I* 






"b N 



* T 



%, 



\^ 




f f . .. S 



++ ^ 










u 4 






-o- 









^ ^ 



^ 



w 

















% 






A- </> 










< '' 1 




o A ^ 








% 


I. 






•^o 


o x 








o ' 


/. 




•71 




















\ 








<\^ 


















oS 



\V V 















A» <n 



A v 












oq v 









» N. 






<y 












0- 






i 












^ % 
























■>* 


o x 




c5 


-c 






</> -\ 









HISTORY 



Christian Church 



ITS ORIGIN TO THE PRESENT TIME. 



BY 



W? M. BLACKBURN, D. D., 

PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY, CHICAGO. 



The roots of the present lie deep in the past, and nothing in the past is dead to the 
man who would learn how the present comes to be what it is." 

—Prof. W. Stubbs, Oxford. 



, A879. ^ 



CINCINNATI: 
HITCHCOCK AND WALDEN 

NEW YORK: 
PHILLIPS AND HUNT. 



1879. 



J) 



Copyright by 

HITCHCOCK & WALDEN, 

1879- 



PREFACE. 



Written history must be eclectic. In constructing 
a volume of the present size very much must be left 
unsaid. My aim is to present, from an evangelical 
point of view, an outline of the great facts and doctrinal 
developments in the history of the Christian Church, 
from the time of our Lord to our own day ; to set forth 
the epochs and their characteristics, treating each 
period according to a plan best adapted to it; to state 
causes and results ; to group the facts about represen- 
tative men, places, principles, doctrines, or movements, 
and maintain their chronological order, as nearly as 
possible, while preserving unity of subjects and the logic 
of events ; to survey the facts from other base-lines 
than the old pagan imperialism, the papacy, or some one 
form of Protestantism ; to exhibit the vitality, growth, 
declensions, revivals, and reforms of the Church ; to 
trace the progress of civilization, tolerance, and relig- 
ious liberty; and give most space to those ideas and 
events which enter into the Christian civilization of 
Western Europe and North America. If my readers 
were Russians their interest would lie in the course of 

3 



IV PREFACE. 

the Greek Church ; but as they are of English speech, 
if not chiefly of Saxon race, their inquiries will naturally 
be in the drift of history towards themselves. Hence 
the Greek type of Christianity, after the year 451, 
receives less attention than the Roman; and gradually 
the Roman yields the preference to the Germanic type, 
to the Western National Churches, to anti-papal move- 
ments, to mediaeval dissent, and to those reforms, on 
various bases, which culminated in Protestantism. 

Some new methods and combinations — such as the 
three ministries, the circuit of early churches, the chart 
of early controversies, the new Europe with its six 
types of missions and its monasticism, the dissent and 
reformatory movements from the year 1000 to 1650, 
the circles of Protestant reformers — have been sug- 
gested partly by recent historians, but more by my 
own efforts at compression. 

To all authorities and sources, ancient, modern, 
original as far as possible, and certainly numerous, my 
debt is here gratefully acknowledged. Decided as are 
my convictions in theology and polity, due heed has 
been given to the following maxim of Lord Bacon: "It 
is the office of history to represent the events them- 
selves, together with the counsels, and to leave the 
observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty 
and faculty of every man's judgment." Also Dr. W. 
D. Killen says: "It is the duty of history to daguerre- 
otype, as plainly as possible, the proceedings of the 
various parties in the ecclesiastical drama; and a pure 



PREFACE. V 

theology has nothing to fear from a correct report even 

of the faults of its advocates." What Tillemont hoped 

for his great work may here be expressed for this small 

one, "that the book will not be without a power of 

practical edification. " 

W. M. B. 
Chicago, 1879. 



CONTENTS 



Period I. 

' THE ORIGIN, EXTENSION, TRIALS, AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THE 

CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

A. ». 1—325. 

PAGE. 

Chapter I. The Founding of the Christian Church, i 

Chapter II. From Antioch to Lyons, . . . . . 23 

Chapter III. From Carthage to Caesarea, 42 

Chapter IV. Paganism Dethroned, 62 

Period II. 

CONTR VERSIES IN THE OLOGY, CO UNCILS, AND CREEDS. 
325-451. 

Chapter V. The Nicene Age, 74 

Chapter VI. Two Great Reactions, 99 

Chapter VII. Five Great Controversies, 116 

Period III. 

THE NEW EUROPE: ITS CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY AND SUB- 
MISSION TO THE PAPACY. 
451-1085. 

Chapter VIII. Rome, her Pillagers and Bishops, . . . .139 
Chapter IX. The Frankish Empire and Church, . . . ,166 

Chapter X. Missions in Europe, 185 

Chapter XI. Debates and Conquests, > 223 

Chapter XII. Reforms of the Eleventh Century, . . . .250 

Period IV. 

CULMINATION AND DECLINE OF THE PAPAL POWER. 

1085-1500. 

FIVE KINDS OF ENTERPRISE : MILITARY, INTELLECTUAL, REFORMATORY, 
INVENTIVE, AND LITERATIVE. 

Chapter XIII. Crusaders and Schoolmen, .... . 273 

Chapter XIV. Dissent from Rome, 301 

Chapter XV. Reforms on Four Bases, . . . . . .334 

7 



VIII 



CONTENTS. 



Period V. 

THE RISE AND ESTABLISHMENT OF PROTESTANTISM. 

1500-J660. 

PAGE. 

Chapter XVI. Three Circles of Reformers, 376 

Chapter XVII. The Lutheran Reformation, 397 

Chapter XVIII. The Swiss Reformation, 419 

Chapter XIX. France, Holland, and Scotland, .... 464 

Chapter XX. The Anglican Church, 508 

Chapter XXI. Covenanting Times in Britain, 540 



Period VI. 

NATIONAL CHURCHES AND DENOMINATIONS. 
1C68-1878. 

Chapter XXII. Protestantism in Europe, 583 

Chapter XXIII. Churches of the British Isles, 609 

Chapter XXIV. The Exode to America, . 648 

Chapter XXV. Churches in North America, 665 



Period I. 



THE ORIGIN, EXTENSION, AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THE 
CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

a. 38. I— 325. 

THE HOLY SCRIPTURES THE ONLY STANDARD OF FAITH AND PRACTICE — THE 
CHURCH TRIED BY JUDAISM, PAGANISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND SPECULATIVE 
THOUGHT — A SERIES OF PERSECUTIONS — DEVELOPMENT OF TRUTH AND 
ERROR — PATRISTIC THEOLOGY NOT SYSTEMATIC — PRESBYTERY GRADUALLY 
OVERSHADOWED BY PRELACY. 



Chapter I. 

THE FOUNDING OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Christianity has this advantage, its origin is known. It 
had a historical beginning. We have not to search for the first 
notices of it among fragmentary records and dim inscriptions on 
broken monuments, nor in myths, legends, obscure liturgies, 
and confused traditions./ The statements recorded in the New 
Testament concerning its rise and progress belong to the realm 
of actual history. They relate to persons, acts, events, and 
institutions. They bar out all theories which seek the origin 
of Christianity in natural forces and the spirit of an age, and 
which make it the result of race, climate, epoch, the fusion 
of older elements, and the development of certain tendencies 
towards a new form of civilization. / It began in an age which 
violently opposed it. Against no other religion was such a 
battle waged. In the pagan world, the leaders of the people 
were drifting from the worship of the gods into blank skepti- 
cism. The best philosophies and ideals of virtue did not 
repress vice. The Jews cherished hopes of a Messiah, but 
they did not honor the child of Mary, and elevate him to the 
Messianic office. Jesus did not meet their expectations. His 
miraculous birth, the supernatural events attending his child- 



2 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

• 

hood, the ministry of angels, the renewal of inspiration, the 

divine titles given to the Holy Child, the presentation of him 
to several classes of Jews and even to -Gentile Magi, and the 
new prophecies concerning him, led a few devout souls to 
recognize him as their Messiah, according to their light. But 
the majority seemed to ignore him during his childhood, and 
while he grew to manhood at Nazareth. The leading parties 
opposed him during his brief ministry, and crucified him. 
They represented a race and an age of which he was not merely 
the outgrowth. 

The terms Christ and Christianity suggest a cause and an 
effect, an author and a system. Jesus was the Christ, not in 
being the Messiah according to the popular ideas of the time, 
but in being the Prophet, Priest, and spiritual King for all 
people of all ages. He had been the Jehovah of the ancient 
Church of God from the time of the first promise in Eden. In 
it he had dispensed salvation through sacrifices, types, and 
prophecies. Henceforth he would dispense his saving grace 
more personally by his teachings, his obedience to the law, his 
atoning death, and his royal power. Hence, with the change 
of dispensations there was a change in the Church from the 
Jewish to the Christian form. All the enduring elements of 
the old Church were carried forward into the new, and in him 
was preserved the continuity of ecclesiastical life. 

In tracing the outlines of Church history, our point of de- 
parture is not strictly the origin, but the propagation of Chris- 
tianity.* We assume that our readers have at hand the New 
Testament, in which are the great facts and truths to be taught 
to men for their redemption. But at the outset there should 
be a clear idea of the power and method, the agencies and 
means, by which the religion and Church of Jesus Christ were 



*A remarkable preparation for the spread of Christianity is seen in certain 
*« facts: I. The wide extent of the Roman Empire, with its general peace, laws, 
and rights of citizenship. 2. The prevalence of the Greek language and cul- 
ture. 3. The dispersion of Greeks and of. Jews almost every-where in the em- 
pire ; they had a mutual influence on each other. Many Greeks became prose- 
lytes to Judaism. The dispersed Jews were called Hellenists (or "Grecians," 
in Acts vi, 1; ix, 29; xi, 20). Hellenism was the bridge over which Chris- 
tianity passed from the Jews to the Gentiles. 4. The synagogues in the towns 
and cities of the empire; and 5 the Greek version of the Old Testament 
ready for the missionary. 



THE THREE MINISTRIES. 3 

first extended. How came there to be in the Church a stand- 
ard by which to judge of its later growth, its deviations and 
eclipses, or its reformations and revivals ? At its basis are cer- 
tain perpetual ministries — those of Christ, of men, and of the 

Holy Ghost. 

I. The Three Ministries. 

i. The ministry of Jesus Christ. A plain fact here will neu- 
tralize the theory that he gradually became conscious of his 
Messiahship during his public life, and overturn all that is 
built upon a mere assumption. His first public act of authority 
was the expulsion of the traders from the temple in Jerusalem. 
Whom did he then claim to be, and assent to be called? The 
beloved Son of God, well-pleasing to the Father; the equal 
of the Lord God ; the superior of John the Baptist ; the one 
who shall baptize with the Holy Ghost ; the Lamb of God who 
taketh away the sin of the world ; and the Messiah, for he 
had so taught his first disciples that they said, "We have 
found the Christ." He had assented to be called "the Son 
of God, the king of Israel." He had wrought his first miracle 
at Cana. He now performs other miracles, which Nicodemus 
regards as evidences that he is a teacher come from God, and 
that God is with him. In the private interview with this ruler 
of the Jews, he teaches, not only the doctrine of regeneration, 
but also salvation by faith in himself. He shows that he is 
fully conscious of the great purpose for which he is sent into 
the world, and of the death which he shall die. Thus he enters 
upon his ministry when about thirty years of age, in the full 
consciousness of his position, offices, work, and powers. 

His public life, of about three years, was one of extraor- 
dinary activity. His teachings reached all classes of people in 
Palestine.* His words form the groundwork of the doctrines 
taught by his apostles. His miracles were not only evidences 
of his divine mission and kingly sovereignty over all realms 
of creation, but also works of mercy and types of spiritual 



* There were two centers of our Lord's ministry: I. The evangelical was 
Capernaum, or the synagogues of Galilee. His missionary labors were recorded 
by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. 2. The theocratic center was Jerusalem, with 
the temple. This was the chief center and source of the enmity, which led to 
the national rejection of him as the Messiah. John traces the rise, progress, and 
culmination of this enmity, which is an important factor in the history. 



4 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

cures. His peculiar death was involved in his priestly office, 
he being both priest and sacrifice. The Good Shepherd gave 
his life for the sheep. He laid it down on the cross ; he took 
it again in the grave. He ascended to the right hand of his 
Father, not only to be glorified, but to continue his ministries 
as Teacher, Intercessor, and King. 

2. The ministry of men, the first of whom were the apostles. 
One part of Christ's work was to organize a band of men, to 
whom he would commit his Gospel. "He ordained twelve,* 
that they should be with him, and that he might send them 
forth to preach." They were with him as aids to his ministry 
and learners in his school. Even the chief of them — Peter, 
James, and John — did not clearly understand his character and 
words while he lived on earth as their teacher. Their great 
work was yet future. Three events occurred before they were 
fully qualified for their work : the crucifixion of Christ, his res- 
urrection, and the descent of the Holy Spirit at the Pentecost. 
The first gave them the central theme of all preaching, Christ 
and him crucified. After the second they received their new 
commission to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to 
every creature. Under this commission the apostle was more 
than a messenger and missionary ; he was an embassador with 
delegated authority to act in Christ's name, to command, insti- 
tute, ordain, and regulate whatever was necessary in the Church. 
By the third they were enlightened and spiritually qualified for 
the work of apostles. 

3. The ministry of the Holy Spirit. Upon this our Lord laid 
great stress. He said to the faithful of the twelve: "It is 
expedient for you that I go away : for if I go not away the 
Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I depart I will send 
him unto you. He shall teach you all things, and bring all 
things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. 
When he, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will guide you into 
all truth." The Holy Ghost took up the work of redemp- 
tion at the point where Jesus Christ had left it, and applied 
its benefits to men. The advent of the Divine Spirit was as 
real as the incarnation of the Son of God. At Pentecost he 



* Judas is reckoned with the twelve, although Jesus "knew from the be- 
ginning who should betray him." 



CHURCH OFFICES. 5 

came more personally and powerfully into history than ever 
before. The personal "ministration of the Spirit" is a distin- 
guishing mark of the great Christian era in which we live. It 
will never cease until the work of redemption on earth is com- 
pleted. He is the bond of vital union between the three per- 
petual ministries. 

The book entitled "The Acts of the Apostles" contains 
also the acts of the risen Lord and the acts of the Holy Spirit. 
We find the three ministries in co-operation. The first results 
were manifest at the great Pentecost, when the apostles were 
filled with the Holy Ghost, whom the reigning Lord had sent 
as the Comforter. Souls were converted to Christ through their 
preaching ; the Christian Church was organized ; * and in it, as 
they were needed, the proper offices for all time were instituted 
by authority, and not by mere development. What are these 
offices? To this question different answers are given by large 
bodies of Christians who, severally, maintain prelacy, presby- 
tery, or independency. The historian must recognize the later 
existence of these systems as facts, and the right of every ad- 
vocate to appeal to ancient history in support of his own. But 
genuine antiquity must be found in the Holy Scriptures. The 
general view taken in this history is that the office peculiar 
to the apostles ceased with their death ; that presbytery, a 
middle term between prelacy and independency, was the orig- 
inal polity of the Christian Church, although it was simply 
outlined in the New Testament, and may admit of several 
forms ; and that, rightfully, the highest ecclesiastical power re- 
sides in councils of presbyters, who represent a believing 
people. This book is not written to advocate any theory, -and 
all systems are treated as facts in the Divine Providence. Be- 
sides the offices of deacon, elder, and presbyter, there is com- 
mon to all Christian believers a ministry in prayer, instruction, 
example, charity, and beneficence ; and this is perpetual. 

Another result of these three co-operating ministries is the 
New Testament, written by men inspired by the Holy Ghost, 



*In the election of Matthias (Acts i) the apostles and brethren acted inde- 
pendently of the Jewish Church, of which they were still a part. Thenceforth 
they assumed new ecclesiastical powers and privileges. The number of spiritual 
converts to Christ at that time can not be certainly told. Probably most of the 
one hundred and twenty (Acts ii, 15) were of the five hundred in Galilee. 



6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

and under the direction of Christ. In the history of the Chris- 
tian Church it has had its ministry, carrying with it the Old 
Testament. Thus the Church is perpetually under the teaching 
of God, which did not cease when the last page of revelation 
was turned ; for the Bible still goes on into history. It makes 
the history, for it makes the Church. As said a Swiss school- 
master in the days of the Reformation : ' ' The Christian Church 
is born of the Word of God ; it must abide by this Word, and 
listen to no other voice." The later history is a sort of onflow- 
ing of revelation's ceaseless stream, — a continuation of human 
teachings inwrought with revealed truths. It repeats them ; it 
perpetually illustrates them. The Bible has supplied the Church 
with the bread of life. Nothing but a firm adherence to Holy 
Scripture has ever made a sound Church or an earnest Christian. 
Therefore it is our test. How are we to know whether certain 
rites, ordinances, creeds, laws, and institutions have a rightful 
place in the Church? By comparing them with what is enjoined 
or permitted in the Word of God. How are we to know who 
were true Christians, heaven-commissioned reformers, or genu- 
ine martyrs? By measuring them by the Divine Word. 
Therefore, we look for the Bible in the hands of the scholar 
and the preacher ; in the cell of the monk and the luggage of 
the missionary ; in the palace of the emperor, and the hut of 
the peasant; in the heart of the convert, who counts the ad- 
vantages of his native heathenism as loss for Christ, and on the 
lips of the persecuted one who endures the rack or the flaming 
pile,-— and thus we judge whether they are worthy of a place in 
Christian history. 

II. The Apostolic Church. 

The Lord had said to the apostles, "Ye shall be witnesses 
unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, 
and unto the uttermost parts of the earth." Here was a method 
of gradual advance from those who knew most of the truth to 
those who were less informed, and then to those most barba- 
rous. In its progress the Gospel gradually reached Judeans, 
Hellenistic Jews with Judaized Gentiles, Samaritans who were 
half Jews in religion, devout Gentiles, and idolatrous pagans.* 



*This plan is evident in the Acts, thus: 

I. The Church among the Jews — chapters i-vii. Peter the eminent leader, 
and next to him John and Stephen. 



A VISIBLE CHURCH. 7 

The apostles began their work at Jerusalem. The center 
of enmity against Christ must be made the first capital of the 
Church. It seemed a bold movement ; for they had not previ- 
ously shown a daring spirit. All at once they manifested new 
life and new gifts. These poor, illiterate Galileans spoke in 
languages known to the devout Jews, who had come up from 
the chief provinces of the Roman Empire. They caused sur- 
prise and inquiry. At Babel there was confusion because men 
did not understand each other's speech ; here men were con- 
founded because they did understand. Comparative philology 
is unearthing the roots from which the great languages have 
grown, and thus illustrating the primal unity of races in Adam. 
The Pentecost was the type and presage of the nobler discov- 
ery that nations of Aryan, Semite, and Turanian speech are to 
find their spiritual unity in Christ. These apostles were not 
only teachers, but also translators orally of divine truths. At 
the outset they gave sanction to popular versions of the divine 
Word. 

These men, who lately could not claim a synagogue nor the 
dignity of a sect, were now the ministers of the revealed Word 
and the appointed sacraments which were necessary to the 
forming Church. In organizing the Christian Church there 
were these stages : the conversion of new materials by the Holy 
Ghost ; their separation from unbelievers by confessing Christ, 
being baptized and added* to the original band; their union as 
believers in Christ ; and their gradual separation from the Jew- 
ish Church. Thus the faithful came early within the definition 
of a visible Church, as a congregation of believers in which the 



II. The Church among half-Jews, Hellenists, and devout Gentiles — viii-xii. 
Philip the Evangelist leads among the Samaritans, and Peter admits the Gentile 
Cornelius into the Church. The Gospel is carried into Ethiopia, and to Hellen- 
ists of Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch (xi, 19). Christianity is in transition to 
the heathen world. 

III. The Church among the idolatrous Gentiles — xiii-xxviii. Paul the 
chief apostle in the work among the Greek-speaking peoples. His three mis- 
sionary circuits, and his journey to Rome as a prisoner, give the plan to this 
part of the history. 

* The speedy and large additions are emphasized ; Acts ii, 41 — About three 
thousand souls in one day; Acts iv, 4 — "The number of the men was about five 
thousand," probably the total of believers then in Jerusalem; Acts v, 12 — 
Multitudes, both of men and women; Acts vi, 11 — The number of the dis- 
ciples multiplied greatly, and a great number of priests believed. 



8 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Word of God is truly preached, the sacraments duly adminis- 
tered, cordial fellowship maintained, and proper discipline ob- 
served. Inspiration holds up the bright picture of their faith, 
their unity, their communion, their worship, their self-denying 
charity, and their social bliss. They were miraculously puri- 
fied from hypocrisy, and graciously sustained in trials. The 
arrest of Peter and John did not disorganize nor dishearten 
them.* 

The Jews were the first, and during thirty-five years the 
only, willful persecutors of the Christians. It seems that Pilate, 
who had been urged to crucify Jesus, was not asked to repress 
his followers. But Pharisees and Sadducees, long at variance 
in religion and politics, united in their enmity, first against the 
preachers, and later against the people, f In vain did they at- 
tempt to suppress the miracles and that preaching which kept 
the name Jesus ringing in their ears. Prisons were in vain 
when a divine hand opened the doors. Rage yielded somewhat 
to reason when Gamaliel showed the folly of violence. The 
Church needed early to understand the philosophy of persecu- 
tion, though her foes, and, later, even Churchmen, were to be 
ages in learning experimentally that it has no logic to convince 
the thinking mind, no pathos to warm the soul, no terrors to 
convert men. It confirmed the true disciples in their faith, and 
united them in sympathy for Peter and John, who were the 
chief sufferers. It gave dignity to their cause. 

The Hellenists X now came to the front. Many of them 
seemed dependent on those daily supplies provided in common 
for the needy, and for those sojourners who had exhausted 
their purses by tarrying in the city to enjoy the unusual priv- 
ileges of the time. They complained that their widows were 
overlooked in the distribution of supplies. Rations were not 

*Acts ii, 42-47; iv, 32-37: "At a later period every exhortation to alms- 
giving, and every sentence which alludes to distinctions of rich and poor in the 
Christian Churches, is decisive against the [theory of a] community of goods." 
(Milman.) Justin Martyr refers to such charities in his time as are described in 
the Acts. The original design was not accumulation of property, but a fund 
for beneficence. The contributions were voluntary in spirit and measure, as 
they had been during Christ's earthly ministry. 

| Compare Acts iv, 1-7; v, 17; vi, 9-1 1, with viii, 1-3; ix, 1,2. Herod's 
persecution (Acts xii, 1-4) may be regarded as Jewish. 

% Jews of foreign lands, speaking a foreign language. The term may in- 
clude proselytes to Judaism. 



STEPHEN. 9 

served to them. This led to the election of the seven deacons.* 
Probably most of them were Hellenistic in sentiment. Nicolas 
was a proselyte of Antioch. It was important to bring into 
prominence men who were the freest from local and national 
prejudices, generous in their sympathies, ready to place Chris- 
tianity on a footing of true catholicity and universality, lest the 
plastic Church should be cast into molds of conformity to Jew- 
ish rules and rites, customs and ordinances. They would be a 
plank from the shore to the ship which conveyed the Church 
from the Jews to the Gentiles. Stephen and Philip were of this 
class, in their principles and spirit. 

Stephen, full of faith and power, did great wonders and 
miracles among the people. This started a fresh tempest of 
persecution. He was arraigned. In his defense he declared 
that God's religion was not bound up in Judaism ; that his 
presence and favor had not always been confined to the Holy 
Land ; that there had been changes in the institutions of wor- 
ship ; and that even the temple was transitory, compared with 
the better covenant in Christ, f He was stoned to death by an 
angry mob. >" And Saul was consenting unto his death." fThis 
young Benjamite was a Hellenist ; and yet no other Jew is 
named as so fierce a persecutor of the Church as was Saul. 
The leader in "the great persecution," X he made havoc of it, 
tearing it as a wild beast; he entered houses, dragging men 
and women to prison as a fisher drags his net. But he could 
not forget his crime against Stephen. And after his conversion, 
when the Lord told him to escape quickly from Jerusalem and 
save his life, he said : ' * Lord, they know that I imprisoned and 
beat in every synagogue them that believed on thee : and when 
the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing 
by, and consenting unto his death, and kept the raiment of 
them that slew him." Augustine said, "The Church owes 
Paul to the prayer of Stephen." 

From the beaten fire the sparks were driven widely, to 
kindle new flames in distant quarters. The teachers "were all 



* Compare Numbers xi, 1-17, where the complaints of a hungering people 
led to the appointment of the seventy elders. 

t Compare John iv, 2, 3, with Acts vii, 48, 49. Both Jesus and Stephen 
asserted the intended universality of Christianity. 

X Acts viii, I ; xi, 19. 



10 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, 
except the apostles." The persecution seems to have been 
most severe against the Hellenistic element of the Church. 
Certain unnamed men went as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and 
Antioch, preaching to none but Jews. The transition of Chris- 
tianity to the Gentiles was now to begin. Like its author, it 
must needs go through Samaria. There Philip, followed by 
Peter and John, reaped a measureless harvest in a field partly 
sown by our Lord. Philip went southward, baptized an emi- 
nent officer of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, and preached 
in all the cities* till he came to Csesarea. In that new city 
was a large element of Greeks and Romans. There the door 
of the Church was unbarred to the Gentile world, and the gates 
of heathendom were opened to Christianity when the Lord 
employed various ministries to bring Peter and Cornelius to- 
gether. The one was a foreign missionary, clearly taught that 
the Christians must not regard the Gentiles as a ritually unclean 
race to be shut out from the kingdom of Christ. If the other 
was not a proselyte to Judaism he was the noblest pagan of 
whom we have any description. Peter preached the simple 
Gospel. The Holy Ghost was conferred upon the household 
of Cornelius, and his family, friends, and kinsmen were at once 
baptized. This great event was reported in Jerusalem. Then 
was started the question which long disturbed the Church, and 
almost rent it in twain, Was it right for Gentiles to enter the 
Church without first becoming Jews? Those who called him 
to account heard his recital of the facts, "held their peace, 
and glorified God, saying, Then hath God also to the Gentiles 
granted repentance unto life." 

Peter had broken through the wall of partition between the 
Hebrews and the pagans. It was the crowning act of his min- 
istry. He now ceases to be prominent in history. He was not 
the man to extend Christianity among the idolatrous heathen. 
He was imprisoned and released by an angel at the time when 
Herod Agrippa If vexed the Church and slew James, the 



*Peter followed him in this region, and found "saints" at Lydda, and 
Sharon, and Joppa. After y£neas was healed of palsy, and Dorcas was restored 
to life, "many believed in the Lord." 

t Herod, assuming the honors of a god, died as a wretched man about 
A. D. 44. Near this time Paul began his vast foreign missionary work. 



PAUL. 1 1 

brother of John. He seems to have labored, thereafter, among 
the- Jews. The Jewish part of the Christian Church might 
claim him as a leader when he seemed to admit that Gentile 
converts should practice Jewish rites. Paul rebuked his timid 
conduct. But their variance was momentary. Already had 
Peter given his right hand and hearty hospitality to the young 
Saul, when few of the brethren could believe that "he who 
persecuted us in times past was now preaching the faith which 
once he destroyed." In his old age he commended "our be- 
loved brother Paul."* 

Saul, a native of Tarsus when it rivaled Athens in culture, 
a Hebrew by descent, a Hellenist by birth, a Roman by civil 
rights, a zealot for the religion of his fathers, and a persecutor 
who threw the whole Church into alarm, had been converted, 
baptized, and called into the apostleship by the personal reve- 
lation of Jesus Christ. His qualifications were extraordinary. 
In mind, genius, and personal power he took the highest rank. 
His conscientiousness, his intense energy, his burning zeal, his 
firm decision, his iron purpose, his generosity, his sympathy, 
his benevolence to the human race, his eloquence, learning, and 
logic, were all devoted to the risen Lord. He knew sufficiently 
his age and its religious systems in their rivalries and conflicts. 
He knew Judaism, as then misinterpreted and arrayed against 
Christ and his Gospel. It had been impersonated in him- 
self when he was a strict Pharisee, and the chieftain warring - 
against the Church. He knew paganism ; its Greek and Ro- 
man religions, idolatries, and licentiousness, and enough of its 
poetry and philosophy to strike at the very root of its errors. 
It knew not God ; it made gods for itself. In it were no 
"primitive truths" which could save men.f It was the moral 
pestilence raging over all the earth. He came to know Chris- 



*Paul, Peter, and John, "confessedly the three grandest characters and 
most influential actors in the early Christian Church. In the character of their 
minds and in their religious tendencies they are intimately related, forming, as 
it were, mutual complements to each other." (Islay Burns.) If there be a 
Pauline, a Petrine, and a Johannean theology, there is between them no radical 
difference of doctrine or essential variation of statement. 

t "No one who has not examined patiently and honestly the other religions 
of the world can know what Christianity really is, or can join with such truth 
and sincerity in the words of St. Paul, 'I am not ashamed of the Gospel 
of Christ.' (Max Muller.) 



12 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

tianity, with its redemptive powers, its requirements, its charity, 
its pure morality, its noble philosophy, and its matchless the- 
ology. It asked faith in the Lord Jesus as the motive power 
in life. It alone offered to the race the fatherhood of God, the 
kingdom of his Son, the holiness of his Spirit, and a brother- 
hood of men. It alone sent a Gospel, and offered a deliver- 
ance to the whole creation, which was groaning in bondage, 
and waiting for the sons of God to be manifest. Paul took the 
broad view that Christianity must reach out far beyond Juda- 
ism, and finally remove paganism, and bring the creation ' ' into 
the glorious liberty of the children of God." Understanding 
these three systems, Paul was qualified to be the eminent leader 
of that host of missionaries, who should preach the Gospel to 
the pagan nations until they are all gathered into the kingdom 
of Christ. He must meet and vanquish paganism on its own 
soil, and lay down the method of future conquests. The 
career of no other mere man has produced such lasting effects 
upon the history of the world. 

He preached to his Jewish kindred until Antioch was pre- 
pared for him. Certain Greeks* there had been visited by 
Hellenistic teachers, ''and a great number believed and turned 
unto the Lord." They were the nucleus of the first Gentile 
Church. Barnabas was the usher of Paul, the missionary. 
"The disciples were first called Christians at Antioch;" there 
they may have been first known as Christians in the full sense, 
as a body distinct from the Jews, and unwilling that Judaizers 
should entice them into the ritualism of a forsaken Church, f 
There, too, was the first of those contributions which Paul so 
often secured for the poor saints in Judea. 

Antioch became the new center of evangelization. It was 
the mother Church of the Gentile world. From it Paul went 
out upon those widening missionary circuits through Asia 
Minor, then into Europe, until he was at Rome, a prisoner, 
dwelling in his own hired house, visited by inquirers, and 
preaching with all confidence, no man forbidding him. 

*Not Hellenistas, but Hellenas, is the reading most approved. 

tActs xi, 26, with Gal. ii, 11-19. Not Paul but Christ was their leader. 
By a custom almost universal a leader's name was given to his followers, e.g., 
Platonists, Epicureans. These believers at Antioch were thought to be worth 
naming, on account of their strength, their religion, or their supposed phi- 
losophy. There is no proof that the name was given in contempt. 



ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 1 3 

Think what a world St. Paul had to face when his Lord said 
to him, "Go to the Gentiles." His mission was cast in an 
empire which aspired to unite all nations under its military 
sway. There was no uniform civilization; no unity in the 
various religions of the provinces. The Brahmin, the Nile-wor- 
shiper, and the Druid differed from the Roman. The higher 
modes of civil life had worn out for lack of enduring warp and 
woof. Creeds, manners, philosophies, literature, oratory, hero- 
ism, honor, and social virtues were perishing. When Caligula 
declared himself a god, he proved himself worse than a man, 
and when the monster was worshiped, the people confessed 
their amazing degradation. Palaces were often houses of lust. 
The splendor of the rich was the curse of the poor — it took 
from crime its dishonor, and from law its force. About 
three-fourths of this people were wretched slaves, decimated 
by famine, by suffering, and by the combats of the circus. 
The best lands were becoming a desert — the finest cities 
reeked with abominations. The very religion of paganism 
was a source of immorality. Paul did not overdraw it in 
his epistle to the Romans. There were truths in the Aryan 
system, but truths held in unrighteousness were powerless 
for good. Vices were attributed to the gods and practiced by 
their votaries. 

The lofty ideas of a future life, which still gleam in the 
teachings of Socrates and Plato, scarcely lent a glimmer to the 
dying philosophies of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Academi- 
cians. Faith went down in the flood of skepticism.* Reason 
and noble thought sat silent at those voluptuous feasts where 
men said: "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." 

Into that pagan world went Paul, fully conscious that his 
preaching would be an offense to the Jew, foolishness to the 
Greek, and a jest to the Roman, and yet that no knowledge 



*'In the year 79 Vesuvius belched forth the storm of ashes which buried 
Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pliny the Elder perished in it. His nephew, Pliny 
the Younger, eighteen years of age, led his mother to a place of safety. He says 
of the crowd of people, wildly rushing about in the stifling night, "Some 
prayed for the death which they feared. Many lifted their hands to the gods ; 
more were convinced that there were no gods at all, and that the final endless 
night, of which we have heard, . . . had come upon the world. I thought 
I was perishing in company with the universe, and the universe with me — a mis- 
erable and yet a mighty solace in death." 



14 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of physical laws or intellectual science would ever cure its dis- 
orders and woes. Only the Gospel could purify the lives 
of men by renewing their natures, reconstruct society by regen- 
erating individuals, and cast into that haughty, glittering, pre- 
tentious, and abominable civilization the elements of truth, 
virtue, order, brotherhood, and progress. But we do not ignore 
the fact that the Jewish, Greek, and Roman civilizations were 
helpful to Christianity. On his wide mission he found Jews 
with their Scriptures and synagogues, their education and their 
hopes of the Messiah. The Aryan peoples, whom he ad- 
dressed by voice and pen, were not utterly wild and savage. 
Within the Roman Empire was the most advanced civilization 
of the age ; the most vigorous heathen intellect, the best pagan 
culture, the languages not yet surpassed, the literature still 
cherished by us, the art unexcelled, and laws which endure in 
modern governments. If it had not existed the barbarous 
peoples, who finally made spoil of its European domain, might 
have invaded it sooner, and stayed the conquests of the 
Church, or trodden it into the dust. Emperors might perse- 
cute, but the empire must aid Christianity and then pass away. 
Its roads and ships were for missionaries as well as for consuls. 
Its civil law afforded to Paul no small privilege when he 
pleaded, "I am a Roman citizen," and once, at least, was safe 
from the violence of a mob. " Greek culture and Roman 
polity prepared men for Christianity," said Thomas Arnold. 
The mission of Greece was to train the intellect ; that of Rome 
to enact law; that of Judaism to educate the conscience and 
contribute the highest preparation for Christianity, whose mis- 
sion was, and is, to redeem the world by regenerating men. 

There was a spirit of inquiry springing from the want of 
light upon the human soul, its duties, and its destiny. This 
may account for the fact that the foreign religion of Serapis 
was winning ground among the Greeks and Romans. It pre- 
sented the doctrines of a resurrection, a judgment, and a future 
life. It taught men to bury, and not burn, the lifeless body. 
' ' The fact deserves notice, as it indicates the annihilation of all 
reverence for the old system of paganism, and marks a desire 
in the public mind to search after those truths which the Chris- 
tian dispensation soon revealed. A moral rule of life, with a 
religious sanction, was a want which society began to feel when 



THE WORK OF PAUL. 1 5 

Christianity appeared to supply it."* The younger Pliny, feel- 
ing the want, but declining the offered relief, sadly wrote, 
1 'Our vices are too potent for our remedies." 

Adopting the method of a gradual advance, Paul went 
first to the Hellenistic Jews in their synagogues, and then 
to the Gentiles. We now notice the following peculiarities 
of his work : 

1. He usually kept to the front, building on no other man's 
foundation. Large towns and cities were made new centers 
of evangelization. ' ' He is in all the great capital cities of the 
West; in all the great centers of civil, commercial, and intel- 
lectual greatness; in Antioch, in Ephesus, in Athens, in 
Corinth, in Rome. He is among barbarians at Lystra, in 
Galatia, in Melita. He is the one active, ruling missionary 
of what we may call the foreign operations of the Chris- 
tian Church." 

2. He appears as the chief agent in settling the polity of the 
Church, if not also its theology. From him, not from Peter, 
came the fullest instructions concerning deacons and elders, 
or presbyters ; the latter being identical with the bishops 
(episcopoi) in that age.f In the writings of no other apostle 
are there so many rules expressed or implied, touching disci- 
pline, ordinations, the sacraments, and popular instruction ; nor 
such full and clear statements relative to man's natural sinful- 
ness and needs, his inability to save himself, justification by 
faith in Christ and its results, the fruits of the Holy Spirit in 
believers, and the triumphs of the Christian over trials, suffer- 
ings, and enemies. The experience of David voiced in the 
Psalms, and of Paul traced in his letters, have ever since been 
means of assurance, comfort, fortitude, and hope to those who 
are called to endure and be holy. 

3. Paul did most to rescue Christianity from Judaism. The 
one system ran a twofold danger from the other. The Jews 

* Finlay, History of Greece, i. 84. 

t Acts xi, 30: Presbuterous — "These were the overseers or presidents of the 
congregation — an office borrowed from the synagogues, and established by the 
apostles in the Churches generally. Acts xiv, 23 : They are in the New Testa- 
ment identical with the episcopoi. Chap, xx, 17, 28; Titus i, 5, 7 ; 1 Peter v, 
1, 2: So Theodoret on Phil, i, 1. The title episcopos, as applied to one person 
superior to the presbuteivi, answering to our 'bishop,' appears to have been 
unknown in the apostolic times." (Dean Alford, Gr. Test., on Acts xi, 30.) 



1 6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

outside the Christian Church denounced Christ and persecuted 
his followers. The rigorous Jews within the Church insisted 
upon conformity to their ritual, as a condition of membership 
in the Christian fold. They said, "Except ye be circumcised 
and keep the law of Moses, ye can not be saved." Questions 
of this sort led to the First Council, that of Jerusalem, where 
the pastor James (probably the Just) presided. The result of it 
was a letter to the Churches not fully solving the exciting ques- 
tion, but enjoining abstinence from meats offered to idols, from 
blood, from strangled animals, and from licentiousness. These 
might be regarded as elements of that universal law given to 
Noah. Conformity to Judaism was not required, Peter did 
not ask it. 

A colony of Gauls had settled and fixed their name in 
Galatia. Their country-folk still used the Celtic language in the 
fifth century. Warm hearted and impulsive, they had received 
Paul as an angel, and then been fascinated by Judaizers. He 
saw that the Gospel might be repudiated, and he poured out 
his soul in a letter to the Galatians refuting the errors. It may 
be too much to say that it "has had a more powerful effect 
upon the religious history of mankind than any other composi- 
tion which was ever penned, any other words ever spoken ;" 
but it probably "severed conclusively, though not at once, 
Christianity from Judaism." With him the controversy was a 
long battle, and it finally caused his arrest and his journey 
to Rome. 

4. He exceeded all other apostles, so far as we can know, 
in work, if not in perils and sufferings. He was • ' in labors 
more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more fre- 
quent, in deaths oft." The care of all the Churches among 
the Gentiles came upon him. Of most apostles and their co- 
workers we have such traditions as these : Andrew labored in 
Scythia and in Greece, where he was crucified ; Philip in 
Phrygia ; Thomas in Parthia, Persia, and India ; Bartholomew 
in Armenia; Matthew in Ethiopia, after writing his Gospel; 
Simon Zelotes in Northern Africa; Jude in Arabia and Libya; 
and Mark founded the Church at Alexandria. 

Nothing is certainly known of the labors of Peter, except 
his writings, after his brief stay at Antioch. History is quite 
as silent about him as the Romanists are about his wife, whom 



THE EMPEROR NERO. IJ 

tradition reports as a worthy helper in his ministry. No facts 
prove that he resided at Rome. If he was ever there at all, 
he may have suffered martyrdom there about the year 67. 
The better tradition confines his later labors to Asia Minor or 
Babylon, a seat of Jewish culture. 

Paul was probably absent from Rome after his first trial, 
when the great fire of 64 raged for nine days. The emperor 
Nero found himself suspected of having kindled the flames, 
and his activity in sheltering and feeding the homeless, and his 
pagan sacrifices, did not allay suspicion. Perhaps he resolved 
to charge it on the Christians, some of whom were in his own 
household. He may have confounded them with those Jews 
who talked loudly of a Chrestus* soon coming to dethrone the 
Caesars, for which Claudius (41-54) had banished some of them, 
and perhaps Christians with them. But his hatred was, doubt- 
less, more positive. He must relieve himself of this infamy at 
any cost. " Hence," says Tacitus, writing from the heathen 
point of view, ' ' to suppress the rumor, he falsely charged 
with the guilt and cruelly punished those persons who were 
commonly called Christians and were hated for their enormities. 
This name was derived from one Christus, who was put to 
death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate. . . . This accursed 
superstition, for a moment repressed, broke out again and spread, 
not only through Judea, the source of the evil, but through 
the city of Rome, where all things vile and shameful find room 
and reception. First, those were seized who confessed that 
they were Christians ; next, on their information, a vast number 
were convicted, not so much on the charge of burning the city, 
as of hating the human race. In their deaths they were made 
a subject of mockery. They were covered with the hides 
of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to 
crosses, or set on fire to serve as torches at night. Nero lent 
his own gardens for the spectacle. He gave a chariot race on 
the occasion, at which he mingled freely with the crowd in the 
garb of a charioteer, or actually held the reins. The populace, 
with its usual levity, showed compassion for the sufferers, justly 
odious as they were held to be, for they seemed to be pun- 



*" We Christians are accused of hating what is Chrestian (excellent)." (Jus 
tin Martyr.) 



1 8 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ished, not for their actual crimes, nor for the public good, but 
to glut the ferocity of a single man." 

This first imperial persecution may have been limited to 
Rome and the vicinity. But we may suppose that the Chris- 
tians suffered in other quarters, for Tacitus goes on to say that 
to supply money "all Italy was pillaged, the provinces ruined, 
even the gods plundered and their temples despoiled." The 
nerves of Seneca were shaken ; he thought that paganism 
needed an infusion of morality, and became a martyr for his 
efforts. Paul returned to Rome, but found wrath flaming in 
Nero, at whose order, probably, he was beheaded about the 
year 67, a few weeks before the tyrant committed suicide. 
The contrast is striking ; Paul the martyr to his faith, Nero the 
monster in his fears !* 

John still remained. He probably resided at Ephesus as 
the center of his apostolic labors. From his silence upon ques- 
tions that had enlisted the zeal of Paul we may infer that the 
alliance and the conflict between Judaism and Christianity had 
virtually ended, and that many Judaizers had run into heresy. 
The Church had been freed from ritualistic bondage. The 
Seven Years' War in Judea also contributed to this result. 
The Jews, who rejected the true Christ, hailed almost every 
demagogue as their Messiah. Ringleaders entangled them in 
plots and seditions. The Romans provoked them to revolt. 
The war broke up society and made cities a desert. The sad- 
dest prophecies were fulfilled in the siege and destruction 
of Jerusalem, about the year 70, when more than a million 
people perished. Fire and shovel leveled the temple to the 
ground. The effects upon Christianity were manifest. The 
Jews no longer existed as a nation to oppose it. Thence- 
forth they were to wander at large over the earth, an evidence 
of divine prophecy, a homeless people, with the ancient ritual in 
their hands, but without the means and place to maintain its 
holiest worship. It was in vain for Judaizers to insist that 



*"Consult your histories; you will there find that Nero was the first who 
drew the imperial sword upon the Christian sect, then making progress espe- 
cially at Rome. But we glory in having our condemnation hallowed by the hos- 
tility of such a wretch. For he condemned whatever was of singular excel- 
lence. . . . By his cruel sword the seed of Christian blood was sown at 
Rome." (Tertullian.) 



CHURCH IN JERUSALEM. 1 9 

Christians must keep the law of Moses. Only circumcision 
was left to them. Then the writings of Paul must have been 
read in a new and convincing light by thousands whom the law 
had ushered into the school of Christ. 

Meanwhile, the Church in Jerusalem had seen her pastor, 
James the Just, slain by a Jewish mob. His nephew, Symeon, 
had led the Christians out of the siege to Pella, east of the 
Jordan. Some of them may have dwelt in Perea and Moab, 
where the ruins of Christian churches are the wonder of the 
traveler. Some of them seem to have drifted towards the early 
Gnosticism of Simon Magus and Cerinthus, or cast their hope- 
less lot among the nurses of those little sects which pieced out 
theories of law and Gospel with the rags of Plato and Zoro- 
aster. The Docetists held that the body of Christ was a mere 
phantom or appearance ; they denied his humanity. The 
Ebionites held that Jesus was a real man and the Messiah, in 
whom a higher spirit (the Logos) dwelt from the time of his 
baptism until he was about to be crucified; they denied 
his divinity.* The writings of John were the antidote to 
such errors. 

Symeon brought back the truer disciples to Jerusalem, 
where they dwelt as a sad flock amid the memorials of glory 
and desolation. He is the last-named Christian who persisted 
in the Jewish rites. Having witnessed the astounding events 
of a hundred years, he died a martyr to his faith and to the 
blood of David that ran in his veins. It is said that many 
thousands of Jews, seeing the temple, the altar, and the nation 
at an end, yielded to the kindly invitations of Jesus Christ. 
But the mother Church never rose again to eminence. She 
had fulfilled the designs of her Lord. She was not to be ex- 
alted by men to an unwarranted primacy. She sits veiled in her 
heavy grief, and history passes from her to the Gentile lands. 

The Apostle John was involved in the next persecution, 
waged by Domitian,f who was scarcely less vicious and cruel 

* These sects, with the Nazarenes, Nicolaitanes, Cerinthians, and Elxaites 
were not nearly enough Christian to be classed as heretics, unless we follow 
Epiphanius and count barbarism and stoicism among the heresies. They were 
the tares among the wheat, and they are not worthy of being stored in Chris- 
tian History. 

t Tacitus says: "I was promoted to office by Domitian before he openly 
professed a hatred of all good men ; after that I sought no further advance- 



20 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

than Nero. Even to such men divine honors were paid. Flat- 
terers said, ' ' If Domitian be not a god absolutely, he is at 
least a god to the Romans." In the theater he and his wife 
were cheered as "Our Lord and Lady," the Jupiter and the 
Juno of the empire. At length his title upon a public edict 
was "Our Lord and God!" The people admired the phrase. 
Such rulers were jealous when Jesus Christ was called the 
Lord, or the Son of David, and a king. In hating the Jews 
he included the Christians, who were held up as atheists and 
deniers of the Roman deities, and sent into exile or into the 
Catacombs. John was banished to Patmos. Perhaps he la- 
bored there in the quarries; certainly he there received "the 
Revelation of Jesus Christ," in which were letters to the Seven 
Churches of Asia Minor. He was doubtless their overseer. 
He seems to have returned to Ephesus when the exiles were 
recalled by Nerva, the first of a series of just and humane 
emperors. The legends that John had been put into a caldron 
of burning oil, and that he fled in horror from a bath because 
Cerinthus was there, are of less value than this : When too 
aged to preach he was often carried into the Christian assem- 
bly, where he said, "Little children, love one another." He 
died soon after the close of the first century. 

Among the pupils of St. John we may reckon Ignatius and 
Polycarp, the chief of the Apostolic Fathers, so called from 
having been associates or learners of the apostles. These two 
will come before us in the further history ; the five others 
belong simply to the class of writers, for we know almost 
nothing of their lives.* It is well to notice how one line of 
communication, reaching from our Lord through one hundred 
and seventy years, was formed by four teachers. Irenseus, who 
died about 202, thus wrote, with a vivid recollection of his 
youth: "I can describe the very place where the blessed Poly- 
carp used to sit and talk ; also his personal appearance, mode 
of life, and his discourses to the people ; and how he would 
speak of his familiar intercourse with John and with others who 
had seen the Lord. He told us whatever he had heard from 



ment." Senators and philosophers were banished, so that " nothing noble or 
virtuous might confront men's view. Our very sighs were noted down as evi- 
dences of guilt." 

* See Note I to this chapter. 



NOTES TO CHAPTER I. 21 

them concerning the Lord's teaching and miracles. I listened 
attentively, and treasured up these things, not on paper, but in 
my heart." 

NOTES. 

I. The Apostolic Fathers. Barnabas and Clement of Rome, who 
were probably not co-laborers of Paul ; Hermas, a Roman, who seems to 
have written "The Shepherd," an allegory; Ignatius and Polycarp (see 
Chap. II). The best writings ascribed to these five men are so far below 
those of the New Testament that they afford some proof of its inspiration. 
Their theology is mainly Christian, and their spirit devout. Some of them 
have evidently been interpolated with statements about the sign of the cross, 
holy water, the letters I. H., as the anagram of Jesus Christ, celibacy, honors 
to Mary, purgatory, and the full subjection of presbyters to bishops. To 
these five some add Papias, the promoter of a secret undergrowth of super- 
stitions, and, far more worthily, the unknown author of the Epistle to 
Diognetus, "an exquisite specimen of the sentiment and religion of an 
early period." It was written at a time when the Christians were widely 
dispersed and clearly distinguished from the Jews. 

II. The causes of the rapid spread of Christianity are found in the 
three ministries, and in its adaptation to meet the spiritual wants of man- 
kind. But skeptics have sought for the causes in the society of that age. 
" Some have imagined that the kindness of the Christians to the poor in- 
duced multitudes to embrace their faith ; but it is here forgotten that the 
profession of Christianity involved an immediate risk of life. Others have 
represented that the profligate lives of the pagan priests caused many to 
become Christians ; but the profligacy of the priests could not infuse the 
love of a faith which put credit, property, and life itself to the hazard. 
Others again, as Celsus, Julian, and Porphyry, have affirmed that the 
Churches gathered by the apostles were composed of plebeians and women, 
i. e., of persons deficient in intelligence, rank, and wealth, who might easily 
be persuaded to believe any thing by persons of moderate talents ; but this 
is not true, for among those converted by the apostles were many persons 
of wealth and learning (i Tim. ii, 9; 1 Peter iii, 3; Col. ii, 8), and 'a great 
company of the priests were obedient to the faith' (Acts vi, 7)." 

III. Causes of Roman persecution. (1) The Church was morally ag- 
gressive and successful. (2) Christianity was an "exclusive religion." It 
knew only one method of salvation ; and hence it - squarely opposed all 
heathen systems. It required men to abandon all their sins and renounce 
all idolatries. (3) The Christians contemned the religion of the state, which 
was closely connected with the Roman government ; and the Romans, al- 
though they tolerated religions from which the commonwealth had nothing 
to fear, would not suffer the ancient religion of their nation to be derided, 
and the people to be withdrawn from it. Yet these things the Christians 
dared to do. They also assailed the religions of all other nations. Hence, 



22 



HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



they were thought to be unfriendly to public peace. (4) The Christian 
worship had no sacrifices, temples, statues, or oracles ; hence, its professors 
were deemed atheists, and by the Roman laws atheists were regarded as the 
pest of human society. (5) Moreover, the worship of so many pagan dei- 
ties afforded support to great numbers, who were in danger of coming to 
want if Christianity should prevail. Such were the priests, soothsayers, 
statuaries, players, gladiators, and others, who depended for a livelihood on 
the worship of the heathen gods, or on spectacles which the Christians ab- 
horred. (6) Their cautious method of performing the offices of religion, 
dictated at first by fear of persecution, caused horrid calumnies to be circu- 
lated against them. Licentiousness and magical rites were popularly imputed 
to them ; and it was believed that national calamities were sent by the gods, 
because the Christians, who contemned their authority, were tolerated. (7) 
By the law of reaction paganism was revived in no small degree. The 
priests became more active, and the people more interested in their rites. 

IV. The effects of the pagan persecutions were not altogether unfavora- 
ble to the progress of Christianity. They restrained hypocrisy. " Their 
extreme barbarity was not only revolting to the spectators, but gave fortitude 
to the sufferers, whose constancy in torture won the admiration of the best 
part of the heathen, and convinced them of the sincerity of the Christians. 
And, further, Christians were dispersed into distant lands by the cruelties 
practiced against them, and they carried with them the doctrines of the 
Gospel to places which would otherwise have long remained without them." 

V. Number of pagan persecutions. There were more than ten local 
and provincial, and less than ten general, persecutions. In a list of the 
emperors most concerned in our history the italics denote the persecutors, 
as usually given, those marked f the general persecutors, and the small 
capitals the most favorable emperors : 



Nero, . . . A. D. 54-68 


Sept. Severus,~\ . 


1 93-2 1 1 


Valerian, . . 


254-260 


Vespasian, . . . 


70-79 


Caracalla, . . . 


212-217 


Gallienus, . . 


260-268 


Domitian, . . . 


81-96 


Elagabalus, . . 


218-222 


Claudius II, . . 


268-270 


Nerva, .... 


96-98 


Alex. Severus, 


222-235 


Aurelian, . . . 


270-275 


Trajan? .... 


98-117 


Maximin, . . . 


235-238 


Tacitus, . . . 


276 


Hadrian, . . . 


II7-I38 


The Gordians, 


238-244 


Probus, etc., . 


276-284 


Antoninus Pius, 


138-161 


Philip Arab., . 


244-249 


Diocletian^ \ 
Galerius, j 


284-311 


Marc. Aurelius, 


161-180 


Decius^ . . . . 


249-251 


Commodus, . . 


180-193 


Gallus, etc., . . 


251-254 


Constantine, 


• 311-337 



% I" 



n 






CIRCUIT OF CHURCHES. 



23 



Chapter II. 

FROM ANTIOCH TO L YONS* 

100-300. 

Pliny the Younger was one of the noblest Romans of the 
new age, when people talked happily of the "good emperors. 1 ' 
In his charming "Letters" we meet with some of the best men 
and women of pagan society, and find sketches of a few of the 
notorious scoundrels in politics. He had some belief in Provi- 
dence. As a lawyer in Rome, he was active in bringing to pun- 
ishment those consuls who robbed provinces, and informers who 
became princes among millionaires and the terror of good citizens. 
He was rich, liberal, and kind to the tenants and slaves on his 
estates. He was no Stoic. He wrote, "To be touched by 
grief, to feel it, but fight against it ; to make use of consola- 
tions, not to be above the need of them, — this is what becomes 
a man." He built a temple at Tifernum, and another at his 
villa near Rome. He offered to contribute largely towards 
establishing a school far up at Como, where he was born. 
What will this literary gentleman say of Christianity? 

To men of his stamp the change from Domitian to Nerva 
was a moral revolution. It marked an epoch. The good old 
emperor was not a tyrant, hating all virtuous and learned men. 
He did not claim to be a god, and then act like a demon. He 
issued no special edict against the Christians ; and yet their relig- 
ion was not a religio licita, one recognized as lawful by the Senate. 
In less than two years his royal mantle fell upon his adopted son, 
Trajan (98-117), who was a Spaniard by birth, and a new Au- 
gustus in enterprise and policy. From the Roman point of view 
Trajan was the ideal of a wise, moderate, just ruler and reformer. 



* The plan in Chapters ii, iii, and iv is to follow, as nearly as is practicable, 
a circuit of Churches — thus, Antioch, Athens, Smyrna, Corinth, Rome, Lyons, 
Carthage, Alexandria, and Csesarea. This order of the leading historical 
Churches, from the year 100 to 325, is remarkably chronological as to the chief 
emperors and the representative Churchmen. 



24 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

He brought in that golden age which ended with the Antonines. 
In Church history he appears to less advantage. 

Traveling widely over the empire, he must have seen that 
Christianity was planted in the great capitals, and was extend- 
ing rapidly towards (if it had not reached) Edessa in the east, 
Carthage in the west, Seville in Spain, Lyons in Gaul, and the 
British Isles. In many a village the Jews and pagans must 
have run to the magistrates, crying, "These who have turned 
the world upside down are come hither also : these all do con- 
trary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another 
king, one Jesus." If the Christians met in secret retreats, or 
at night, it was through fear of persecution. They wisely 
shrank from hounding spies and treacherous informers. The 
old law against every illegal religion might be revived. Trajan 
seems to have given heed to some accusers, who charged that 
their prudence covered base plots and crimes, their rites were 
magical arts, and their nightly meetings were infamous revels, 
in which only pagans might indulge. Loyalty and purity were 
expected of Christians. They were transforming society ; and 
any idol-maker or temple-sweeper might cry that his craft was 
in danger, and raise against them the mob, which never reasons, 
and can scarcely be resisted. The emperor issued an edict 
forbidding guilds or clubs, as dangerous to the state. It was 
easy to turn this against that vast Christian brotherhood ex- 
tending throughout the empire, bound together by sacred ties, 
in correspondence with each other, and having much in their 
doctrine and worship that was mysterious to the heathen mind. 

Pliny was sent to govern Bithynia, where he saw the Chris- 
tians so powerful that the temples of the gods were almost 
deserted, and few sacrifices were bought in the markets. He 
writes that the walls of the new theater at Nice are cracked 
from top to bottom ; but Trajan replies, "These paltry Greeks 
are too fond of gymnastic diversions." He tells how the people 
of Nicomedia gazed stupidly on the burning of their city, and 
had no buckets or engines to stop the flames. He proposes to 
organize a fire company; but Trajan answers: "Remember 
such societies have greatly disturbed the peace of your prov- 
ince. Call them by what name you please, they are sure to 
become factious associations, however short their meetings may 
be." Does he here refer to the Christian meetings? 



PLINY'S LETTER. 



25 



Pliny is busy in his efforts to supply Nice and Sinope with 
water from pure fountains, when he finds that the magistrates 
are bringing Christians to trial for their religion. Appeals 
come to him. He writes * to the emperor for advice. He 
knows not their crimes, nor the punishment due them. He 
has not attended any of the trials. Shall he make any dis- 
tinction between young and old, the tender and the robust? 
Shall he release them when they repent or recant? The rest 
of his letter should be read thrice over, as it has been called 
"the first' apology for Christianity." It is a testimony to 
the virtue of the first believers, and the brightest picture of 
Christian life that has come to us from a pagan hand, although 
shadowed by the faithlessness of some who denied their Lord. 
It echoes the hymns of those who pledged fidelity to each 
other, vowed to live holily, and shared in the simple joys 
which rose above their common sorrows : 

' ' My method has been this : I asked those brought before me 
whether they were Christians. If they confessed, I asked them 
twice afresh, with a threat of capital punishment. If they per- 
sisted obstinately, I ordered them to be executed ; for I had no 
doubt that, whatever the nature of their religion, a willful and 
sullen inflexibility deserved punishment. Some that were in- 
fected with the madness, being entitled to the privileges of 
Roman citizens, I reserved to be sent to Rome, to be referred 
to your tribunal. As information poured in that they were 
encouraged, more cases occurred. A list of names was sent 
me by an unknown accuser, but some of the accused denied 
that they were or ever had been Christians. They repeated 
after me an invocation of the gods and of your image. They 
performed sacred rites with wine and frankincense, and reviled 
Christ, none of which things, I am told, a real Christian would 
ever be compelled to do. Therefore I dismissed them. Others, 
named by an informer, first confessed and then denied it, and 
declared that they had forsaken that error three or four 
years, some even twenty years, ago. . . . And this was 
the account which they gave of the nature of the religion 
they once professed, whether it deserve the name of crime or 
error: That they were accustomed to meet on a stated day, 
before sunrise, and to repeat among themselves a hymn to 

* Probably in the year 112. 



26 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves as with an oath 
not to commit any wickedness, not to be guilty of theft, rob- 
bery, or adultery, never to break a promise or withhold a 
pledge ; after which it was their custom to separate, and 
meet again at a promiscuous, harmless meal [doubtless the 
love-feast connected with the Lord's Supper]. From this last 
they desisted after I published my edict, according to your 
orders, and forbade any secret societies of that sort. To come 
at the truth, I thought it necessary to put to the torture two 
women, said to be deaconesses. But I could gather nothing 
except a depraved and excessive superstition. Deferring fur- 
ther investigation, I resolved to consult you, for the number of 
culprits is so great as to demand serious consideration. In- 
formers lodge complaints against a multitude of every age and 
of both sexes. More still may be impeached. The contagion 
of this superstition has spread through cities and villages, and 
even reached farm-houses. Yet I think it may be checked. 
The success of my endeavors forbids despondency; for the 
temples, once almost desolate, begin to be frequented ; victims 
for sacrifice, that scarcely found a purchaser, now are sold 
every-where. Whence I infer that many might be reclaimed, 
were the hope of pardon, on their repentance, absolutely con- 
firmed." 

Let us carefully read the emperor's reply, for we have no 
other trace of his policy at that time towards the Christians : 

' ' You have adopted the right course, my dear Pliny, in 
your investigation of the charges made against the Christians 
brought before you ; for, truly, no one general rule can be laid 
down for all such cases. These people must not be sought 
after. If they are brought before you, and the offense is 
proved, let them be punished ; but with this restriction, that if 
any one denies that he is a Christian, and shall prove that he 
is not by invoking the gods, he is to be pardoned, notwith- 
standing any former suspicion against him. But anonymous 
libels should never be heeded ; for the precedent would be 
dangerous, and altogether inconsistent with the maxims of our 
government." 

To be a Christian was a punishable offense, yet the wise 
policy was to connive at it, and not hunt down the offender ! 
Punish him if he be led to trial, unless he deny Christ! Se- 



IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH. 27 

crecy, death, or open apostasy were the choices offered to the 
Christian. There are traditions of martyrs at Edessa while 
Trajan was righting the Parthians. The story that he banished 
eleven thousand Christian soldiers to Armenia is not trustworthy. 

In the year 1 1 5 Trajan was at Antioch, when an earthquake 
destroyed hundreds of people. He crept through a window 
and escaped from a shattered house. This event, like the fire in 
Nero's time, may have been charged upon the Christians. Did 
Ignatius go before the emperor to plead their innocence? We 
know not why, how, nor when he came before Trajan, but this 
date is most probable. He had labored forty years at Antioch, 
and he is said to have suspected that the storm raised by 
Domitian had spared him as one not worthy of the martyr's 
crown. We should know more of his life, labors, and opin- 
ions, if seven of the letters attributed to him had not been 
interpolated, and eight more forged. We could know more 
of his trial and final sufferings if "The Martyrdom of Ignatius" 
were proved to be a more genuine document than most early 
"acts" of martyrs. According to it, during the examination 
he gave his name as Theophorus. "And who is Theophorus?" 
inquired Trajan. "He who carries Christ in his heart." "Do 
you not think that we have the gods in our minds when we use 
them as allies against our enemies?" "The heathen demons 
are not gods. There is but one God, who made all things, 
and one Jesus Christ, whose kingdom may I obtain!" "Do 
you speak of him who was crucified under Pontius Pilate?" 
"I speak of him who bore my sin on the cross." "Do you 
then bear the crucified within yourself?" "I do, for it is 
written, 'I will dwell in them.' " 

Trajan must have regarded this man, not as a secret member 
of a dangerous guild, but as an openly bold preacher of 
"another king, Jesus," whose lordship might be spiritual, and 
yet far more supreme than his own in thousands of hearts, and 
utterly destructive of the national gods whom the bishop called 
demons. Jealousy and zeal for his religion may have moved 
him to give this sentence: "Since Ignatius has declared that 
he bears within himself the crucified, we order that he be taken 
by soldiers to Rome, and there be the food of wild beasts, and 
a spectacle to the people." If sent to terrify his brethren 
along the route, he proved their comforter. He said his chains 



28 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

were his spiritual jewels. At Smyrna he may have said to 
Polycarp, ' ' Be firm as an anvil when it is beaten. ... I 
would rather die for Christ than rule the world." 

Vespasian had adorned Rome with the vast Coliseum, on 
whose tiers of seats eighty thousand people could sit and gaze 
upon lion-fights and the still more barbarous combats of gladi- 
ators. There Ignatius was devoured by lions, and not a pro- 
test from the crowd of inhuman spectators is on record. 

A milder policy was adopted by Hadrian (i 18-136), a Ro- 
man of Grecian culture and spirit, an inquirer into philosophies 
and religions, restless, versatile, and capricious, causing the 
Senate to question whether he was a god or a tyrant. Wishing 
to inspect every corner of the empire, he traveled widely 
through the provinces from his wall in Britain to the Euphrates. 
He must have known by eyesight that the Christians were 
harmless in their societies, diligent artisans, prosperous farmers, 
thrifty shopkeepers, with good sense in worldly affairs, and the 
only people who cared much for the poor, the helpless, and the 
suffering. If he was urged, in 125, when at Athens, to punish 
them as wretches whose impiety provoked the gods to with- 
hold rain and fruitful seasons, he denied the request with little 
fear of an insurrection. He willingly read or heard the apolo- 
gies of pastor Quadratus and philosophic Aristides. No parch- 
ment conveys to us those defenses of Christianity. Their 
effect upon Hadrian was favorable to the Christians. He felt 
the justice of their pleas. A proconsul of Asia wrote to him 
that "it seemed unjust to put to death men who were not con- 
victed of any crime, merely to gratify a clamorous mob." He 
replied, * ' If any accusers prove that the Christians really break 
the laws, do you determine the nature of the crime. But 
if the charge be a mere calumny, estimate the enormity of the 
slander, and punish the accuser as he deserves." 

The Jews of Palestine revolted under a false Messiah, Bar- 
cochaba, and slew many Christians. They were conquered and 
expelled. On the ruins of Jerusalem a new city was built, and 
named ^Elia Capitolina. Its old name was quite lost for an 
age. Hadrian there reared temples to Venus and Jupiter. 
The Christians were allowed to dwell in Palestine ; the Jews 
were forbidden to return. Thus Christianity was completely 
separated from Judaism. 



ANTONINUS PIUS— POLYCARP. 



2 9 



"The long reign of Antoninus Pius (1 38-161) is one of those 
happy periods that have no history. An almost unbroken 
peace reigned at home and abroad. Taxes were lightened, 
calamities relieved, informers discouraged ; confiscations were 
rare, plots and executions were almost unknown." Yet Chris- 
tians suffered no little from mobs and unjust magistrates. Justin 
Martyr felt impelled to offer to this emperor his first Apology, 
"in behalf of those of all nations who are unjustly hated and 
wantonly abused, myself being one of them." 

It now seems probable that Polycarp was the victim of a 
mob, about the year 155,* when some of his flock at Smyrna 
were impaled on spears, and thrown to the wild beasts of the 
circus. He resolved to stay at his post "firm as an anvil." 
The crowd shouted, "Take away the atheists ! Give us Poly- 
carp !" His friends urged him into the country. A young 
man, under stress of torture, betrayed his hiding-place. He 
was tracked to a farm-house, where he presented himself to his 
pursuers. He treated them with hospitality, and set out with 
them on the road to the city. On the way an officer kindly 
asked him, "What harm will it do thee to say 'Lord Caesar,' 
and join in the sacrifice to the gods?" Thrice he repelled such 
an artifice to save his life. Angry at their failure they threw 
him out of the chariot, wounding him. He limped on to the 
place of trial. The insane yells of the mob were his welcome. 
He was again urged to renounce Christ and swear by the genius 
of Caesar. The face of the old man looked severe as his eyes 
swept over the multitude intent upon his destruction, and then 
turned heavenward as he said, ' ' Renounce Christ ! Eighty and 
six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong. 
How then shall I curse my king and my Savior?" Still they 
entreated and threatened, yet every answer baffled them. 
The judge was perplexed. But Jews and pagans rent the air 
by shouting, * ' This is the teacher of Asia ! This is the father 
of the Christians! This is the overturner of our gods!" The 
fagots were ready, and, bound to the stake, the patriarch 
uttered his last prayer: "Omnipotent Lord God, Father 
of Jesus Christ, I bless thee that thou hast counted me 

*So the latest critical researches. Even Renan and Hilgenfeld admit this 
date, in place of 166-7, which has long been adopted. The date of 155 gives 
about twelve years more to his contemporary life with the Apostle John. 



30 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

worthy, in this hour, to take a place among thy martyrs, 
and to drink of the cup of thy Christ for the resurrection 
unto eternal life." Through fire he passed to glory. His 
death gave peace to the flock. 

Marcus Aurelius (161-180), the adopted son of Antoninus, 
has been praised as a still nobler man and emperor, and his 
" Meditations" as "the noblest and purest book of pagan 
antiquity." A philosopher was on the throne. He improved 
the schools of Athens, and her university became the most 
celebrated in the world. In his stoicism he looked with con- 
tempt on the faith and zeal of the Christians. He introduced a 
system of espionage and tortures in order to force them to 
recant. It seems that he was urged to persecute them in order 
to appease the heathen gods, who were thought to be angry at 
the moderation of the emperors, and therefore shook the East 
with earthquakes ; sent ravaging fires into the cities of the 
West ; caused the Tiber to flood Rome and carry away houses, 
destroy granaries, and sweep the cattle from the Campania ; 
provoked wars throughout the empire, and brought from Asia 
a pestilence which threatened to lay waste the world. He at 
first declined, and issued an edict similar to that of his prede- 
cessor, requiring that the commission of some criminal act, and 
not merely a belief, must be proved against any one before he 
could be punished, and denouncing capital punishment against 
the accuser of a Christian as such. Notwithstanding this edict, 
persecution prevailed extensively during the greater part of his 
reign, connived at and encouraged by this most philosophic of 
the Roman emperors. Lardner assigns three reasons for this : 

1. The Christians refused to join in the common worship of the 
heathen deities, and reflected freely upon the philosophers. 

2. They outdid the Stoics in patience under suffering. 3. The 
emperor was a bigot in religion and philosophy. He said, 
"Whosoever shall bring in novel religions, or do any thing to 
disturb the minds of men with fear of the divine power, let him 
be punished." 

At length he grew furious. The old religion must be 
revived and the new faith crushed. For the one he gathered 
priests from all quarters, as if he were the bishop of paganism, 
and he provided so many sacrifices that a sarcastic wit hinted 
that there would soon be a dearth of oxen. Against the other 



OPPONENTS OF CHRISTIANITY. 3 1 

he let magistrates and people rage. Informers were well paid 
by judges, who confiscated to their own use the property of the 
victims. The persecution was largely the work of the mob, 
whose example was imitated one hundred years later, when 
Dionysius of Alexandria wrote thus: "We saw the crowd 
burst suddenly into our dwelling by a common impulse. Every 
one entered some house known to him, and began to spoil and 
destroy. All objects of value were seized ; worthless wooden 
furniture was burned in the street. The scene was that of a 
town taken by assault." The Christians seem to have made no 
armed resistance. During this reign there were two persecu- 
tions, and a bolder literary attack upon Christianity. It was 
the noon of the first Age of Apologies. 

The opponents of Christianity were not satisfied with the 
use of fire and sword. It was not enough to attack the bodies 
of men whom physical conflict could not repress; their belief 
must be assailed with the pen. Why fight consequences, and 
leave the causes unchecked ? Why mow down believers, and 
yet leave firmly rooted the principles which would shoot up 
into a thicker harvest? The scythe of persecution did not go 
deep enough. The plowshare of skepticism and heresy must, 
if possible, cut up the very roots of Christian doctrine ; this 
was the pen, driven hard by Celsus and Lucian. The first 
of these wits was the Thomas Paine of Greek rationalism, the 
other was the Voltaire of Greek literature. They anticipated 
most of the criticisms and sarcasms put forth by modern infi- 
delity. They were easily answered by abler pens and holy 
lives. Almost any church - roll would show that the Christians 
were not all ' ' mechanics, cobblers, weavers, slaves, women, and 
children." If these were true believers, so much the better 
for their religion. 

The blots of Lucian's pen fell upon Christian character, but 
its keen point exposed many of the absurdities of pagan relig- 
ion. We seem to be at a modern auction when we read his 
"Sale of the philosophers," managed by Jupiter and Mercury. 
"Gentlemen, we now offer you philosophical systems of all 
kinds, a rare lot. If any of you are short of cash, give your 
notes and pay next year. Here is this fellow with long 
hair, the Ionian. We offer you Professor Pythagoras. How 
much? Who wants to know the harmonies of the universe? 



32 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Come, professor, tell them what you know." He is sold cheap. 
"Whom will you have next? That slouchy fellow from Pon- 
tus ? A grand character, gentlemen ; very remarkable, most 
extraordinary. How much for Diogenes, old cloak and all? 
What? only three cents? Well, take him. We're glad to 
get him off our hands, he is so noisy, bawls so, insults every 
body, and his language is not the finest." The auctioneer 
draws from the philosophers their principles, and makes them 
appear ridiculous. Thus he was, unintentionally, an ally of the 
Christian apologists. He blew up the walls through which the 
soldiers would enter the citadel of paganism. In a satire he 
says of the Christians : ' ' These people think they are to have 
everlasting life ; so they despise death. Their first lawgiver 
taught them to live as brothers, renounce the gods of the 
Greeks, worship that crucified sophist, and live by his laws. 
They consider all their property common, and trust each other 
without any valid security. An impostor may practice on their 
credulity." Pure doctrine and Christian conduct were antidotes 
to ridicule. 

Pretentious heresies were more serious. They came with 
solemn weight to sober minds. The fanaticism of the Monta- 
nists attracted those who loved excitement, or hoped to exercise 
apostolic gifts in their trances. Their best traits reappear in 
Irvingism ; their worst in modern clairvoyance. Certain spec- 
ulative minds ran into Gnosticism, which ought not to be 
regarded as a corruption of Christianity, but as an adoption of 
some Christian elements into a system of different origin.* 

Oppression, skepticism, and heresy called forth the pleas 
and defenses of the apologists. Their writings form the most 
vigorous early literature after the apostles. Many of the 
authors were converted rhetoricians and philosophers. They 
mark the time when the bolder thinkers in the Church tried 
pleading in its defense, and then made a brave onset upon 
paganism. We see this gradual advance from the gentle appeal 
to the heroic attack, from the defensive stand to the aggressive 
march, in the several writers from Quadratus to Tertullian.f 
Between them came Athenagoras and Justin, "the philosopher." 

At Athens we find Athenagoras laying down the books of 
Plato, and taking up the Holy Scriptures in order to refute 

*Note I. tNote III. 



CHURCH AT ROME. 33 

them. He reads, is convinced of their tremendous truth, and 
avows himself a Christian. He takes his pen, and sends to 
Aurelius the most elegant and one of the ablest of all the 
apologies. He says: " Three things are alleged against us — 
atheism, the eating of children at our feasts, and all the 
excesses of lust. If these charges are true spare no class ; 
proceed at once against our crimes. Destroy us root and 
branch, with our wives and little ones, if any Christian is found 
to live like a brute. But if these are only idle rumors and 
slanders, it remains for you to inquire concerning our lives and 
opinions, our loyalty and obedience to you, and to grant us 
equal rights with our persecutors. . . . Among us you 
will find uneducated persons, artisans, and old women, who 
may not be able to prove our doctrine by words, but they 
will prove it by their deeds. They do not make speeches, 
but they exhibit good works ; when robbed they do not go 
to law; they give to the needy, and love their neighbors as 
themselves." 

Dionysius of Corinth (170) saw the Churches of Greece 
afflicted by persecutions, poverty, Roman armies, the migrations 
of people to other lands, banishments, and imported heresies. 
The Churches there, so well nurtured by Paul, had quite lost 
their place in history, and Dionysius must represent their 
bishops. He was a watchful overseer. He wrote letters to the 
Churches — some of them in Crete and Nicomedia — to keep 
Christians in unity and caution them against Gnostic errors. 
They must beware of men who were " apostles of the devil," 
sowing tares, and "tampering with the Scriptures of the Lord." 
He defended "the rule of truth," and seems to have applied 
secular learning to the refutation of heresy. 

Passing to Rome, we find no evidence of an early papacy. 
The list of twelve names, given as those of bishops for more 
than a century (67-177), bears marks of manipulation. Since 
the exposure of the Forged Decretals,* we are deprived of the 
history and primacy invented for them. The brightest, yet 
sad, records of the Church at Rome during this period are in 
the Catacombs. f One epitaph in the time of Aurelius reads 
thus : ' ' Alexander is not dead, but lives beyond the stars, and 
his body rests in this tomb. . . . Oh, sad times, in which 

* Note II to Chap. IX. f Note IV. 

3 



34 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

sacred rites and prayers, even in caverns, afford not protection 
to us! . . . He has scarcely lived who has lived in Chris- 
tian times." The first Christian historically eminent at Rome, 
after the apostles, was not a bishop, but a layman — Justin, the 
philosopher, apologist, and martyr. 

Justin was a native of Neapolis, near the old Sychar, in 
Samaria. His father, probably a Roman, left him some prop- 
erty. His Greek culture prepared him for Christianity. He 
was the man of his age, familiar with its troubles, its restless- 
ness, its griefs, its feeling of emptiness since the gods had been 
dethroned ; and yet he was free from its corruptions and vain 
ambitions. He had not gone down in the whirl of social vices. 
Thirsting for truth, he sought the fountain in various schools 
of philosophy. But the Stoic knew nothing of value. The 
Peripatetic cared mainly for a large fee. The Pythagorean was 
a pompous charlatan, who talked only of angles, music, and 
the stars. Justin knew little about the stars, and probably 
cared less. His want was God and the waters of life. A 
Platonist charmed him by telling him to think and think, and 
do nothing else, until his mind should soar to the Deity. Be 
saved by thinking ! 

Near some sea-shore he dwelt, and thought, and waited for 
the vision of divinest truth. One day he paced along the 
shore, musing and listening to the waves, and soon found him- 
self staring at a fine-looking old man, who asked him, "Do 
you know me, that you gaze upon me so earnestly?" Justin 
explained ; he was on the search for truth. He was told some- 
thing to think about ; and this obscure father led him to the 
Divine Word, and gave him to the Church at the age of thirty. 
He was struck with the majesty of the Holy Scriptures, the 
heroism of the martyrs, and the nobleness of Christian lives. 
He devoted his energies to teaching and defending "the only 
true, safe, and useful philosophy." He did not preach. This 
Christian Socrates wandered through cities, talking with men, 
intent upon winning learned pagans to Christ. At Rome he 
took his place near certain baths, and in his philosopher's 
robes, which he never doffed, he acted the part of a Christian 
converser. He wrote busily to convince Jews, heathen, and 
heretics. He labored to make the earnest thought of all ages 
and all races point to the Incarnate Word and center in Christ, 



CHRISTIAN WORSHIP. 35 

the source of every good idea, the light of history, the life of 
the world. "The eternal Logos, coming forth from Godj was 
the seed-light to the ages that preceded the full revelation of 
the Gospel." He represents the less hurtful tendencies to 
'speculative thought, but his varied writings contain more good 
theology than most historians ascribe to them. 

In his first Apology, addressed to Antoninus, he refutes 
the charge of atheism, and says: "Some gownsmen teach it. 
You heap honors and prizes upon those who poetically insult the 
gods; but you punish us. We confess that we are atheists 
with reference to demons and imaginary deities, but not with 
respect to the most true and holy God. . . . We do 
not ask that you punish our accusers; their ignorance and 
wickedness is punishment enough. . . . Punish those who 
are Christians only in name. You may kill, but you can not 
hurt us." 

Those who wish to look in upon the worship of the early 
Christians will be interested in this passage: "On the day 
called Sunday (the day of the sun) all who live in cities, or in 
the country, gather in one place, and the memoirs of the apos- 
tles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time 
permits, then the president verbally instructs and exhorts to the 
imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and 
pray [singing is elsewhere mentioned] ; then bread and wine 
and water are brought, and the president offers prayers and 
thanksgivings according to his ability, and the people say, 
Amen. There is a distribution to each [in the Lord's Supper], 
and a partaking of that over which thanks have been given, 
and a portion is sent by the deacons to those who are absent. 
The wealthy among us help the needy; each gives what he 
thinks fit ; and what is collected is laid aside by the president, 
who relieves the orphans and the widows, and those who are 
sick or in want from any cause, those who are in bonds and 
strangers sojourning among us ; in a word, he takes care of all 
who are in need. We meet on Sunday because it is the first 
day, when God created the world, and Jesus Christ rose 
from the dead." 

Justin was moved to address his second Apology to Marcus 
Aurelius by a peculiar case of injustice. A woman had 
repented of her wild sins, tried in vain to reform her husband, 



36 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

and obtained a divorce. He then accused her of being a Chris- 
tian. The emperor protected her until some criminal act 
should be proved. The vicious man then accused her Christian 
teachers and defenders, three of whom were put to death. " I, 
too, expect to be plotted against," writes Justin, "and fixed to 
a stake by some of these philosophers, who charge us with 
crimes in order to curry favor with the deluded mob. I con- 
fess that I do strive to be a Christian." He was thrown into 
prison. Soon the two philosophies, pagan and Christian, were 
brought face to face, when Rusticus, the stoic and minister 
of Aurelius, jocosely asked Justin, "Do you imagine that after 
your head is cut off you will go straight to heaven?" "Imag- 
ine? I know it," was the reply. "Our great desire is to suffer 
for Christ, at whose bar the whole world must appear." He 
was sentenced to death along with several friends, probably in 
167, the time of the first persecution under Marcus Aurelius; 
the second is associated with Irenaeus. 

At Lyons, in Gaul, we meet Irenaeus (140-200), who had 
listened to Polycarp, left his native East, and sought a home in 
the far West. He became an elder, then a presbyter, or bishop, 
in the Church which had been planted there at an early day. 
He talked in Celtic with the Gauls, an inquisitive people, stop- 
ping travelers to gather .the news, great boasters and rough 
fighters, whose fathers had yielded to Rome when they could 
not help it, and then set to work to make their chief town a 
rival of the imperial city. Italians had come there to build 
mansions, temples, theaters, and tombs. Greeks from Asia 
Minor settled there to drive a busy trade, and the best of them, 
probably, organized the Church,* which became a new center 
of missionary labors. Thence the Gospel seems to have been 
carried to the tribes of the Alps and the Rhine, Northern 
Gaul, and Britain. 

In those searching times the East sent into the West not 
only heralds of truth, but teachers of error, cunningly baiting 
their hooks with sound words and catching the simple-minded 
Gauls. Irenaeus exposed them. They may have turned in- 



* Among the martyrs at Lyons Irenaeus names "Attala, of Pergamos, who 
was always a pillar of our Church, and in great repute among us; Alexander, 
of Phrygia, a physician, full of apostolic gifts, and well known to the Gauls for 
his charity and zeal." 



BLANDINA— BISHOP POTHINUS. 37 

formers, and caused some Christians to be thrown into prison. 
The prisoners sent him to Rome to plead for them, and to 
assure the bishop, Eleutherius, that they were not ensnared 
in Montanism. 

The fury of the populace at Lyons, in 177, showed itself in 
yells, insults, blows, missiles, and arrests of the Christians. 
Servants were tortured to betray their masters. It was useless 
for one to say, "I am a Roman citizen," for Aurelius or- 
dered, ' ' Put them to death whether they are Roman citizens 
or not; but dismiss all who renounce their faith." One of 
them wrote, "We were declared guilty of crimes which we 
dare not even name, for we can scarcely believe that they were 
ever committed among men. These charges inflamed the 
heathen against us." As the slaughter went on Vettius, a se- 
cret disciple, could no longer endure to be silent ; his bold plea 
before the governor was answered by his martyrdom. Blan- 
dina, the slave girl, was tortured from morning till night, 
scourged, gashed, seared, hung on a cross in the theater, kept 
in jail for another day, then put into a hot wire cage, and thrown 
to the wild beasts. Her young brother was nerved by her 
courage. In the circus, before a noisy crowd, she seemed 
heedless of a growling lion, and calm when tossed high by a 
mad bull. Until the sword took her life, she unconsciously 
flung to her enemies a challenge, which "was enough to teach 
heathen society that the humblest believer is a power not to 
be ignored."* 

The bishop, Pothinus, ninety years old, died of wounds in a 
prison. Irenaeus returned to be chosen his successor, before 
the persecution had quite ceased at Vienne and the neighbor- 
ing towns. His activity won him the title of ' ' the light of the 
western Gauls." His genial piety, his wise zeal, his efforts for 
the general unity of the Church, his official dignity, his fearless- 



*This persecution in 177 forbids us to credit the legend that Aurelius ceased 
from violence towards the Church in 174 on account of the prayer of the Thun- 
dering Legion. The story, doubtless interpolated in the first Apology of Justin, 
may have in it a basis of fact. It is that when he was in Hungary, surrounded 
by barbarians, and his army were dying of thirst, a band of Christians may have 
prayed for rain, and the shower fallen so plentifully that the soldiers drank 
water from their shields. The pagans attributed the relief and the wonderful 
victory to the emperor and the heathen gods. An ecclesiastical legend may 
have exaggerated a providential mercy into a miracle. 



38 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ness, and his skill in battling heresy, have secured to him the 
honor of having been "the greatest bishop of the second 
century, and the representative of the catholicity of the age." 
He was one of the first to exalt the office of bishop above that 
of presbyter. His maxim, il ubi ecclesia, ibi spiritus" would be 
more true if reversed so as to read, " Where the Spirit is, there 
is the Church." In his large work "Against Heresies" he 
exposed the whole system of Gnosticism, and refuted nearly all 
the theological errors of his time. Detesting heresies, he 
pitied those who held them, saying, "We love them better 
than they love themselves. We never cease to hold out to 
them a friendly hand." He probably died a natural death. 

The Emperor Commodus (180-182) had no taste for his 
father's philosophic "Meditations." To stand in the Coliseum 
as a gladiator, slay a thousand lions and hundreds of prize- 
fighters, was the delight of this debauchee, who left no trace 
of a single virtue. He cared for no sort of religion. The 
Church often fared best under the worst emperors. One pro- 
consul, who was driving things hard in Asia, found the Chris- 
tians so willing to suffer for their faith, that, after seizing a few 
of them, he said to the rest, "Wretches, if you are eager to 
die, you have rocks and ropes at hand." Irenaeus says there 
were many Christians at the Court in full liberty. The mis- 
tress, Marcia, seems to have gained the recall of many exiles 
from the mines of Sicily. The consequence of this repose was 
that the new religion traveled into distant countries, which had 
scarcely yet submitted to the Roman arms. It was also em- 
braced by persons of rank, as is shown in the case of Apollo- 
nius, the only distinguished martyr in this reign. He was a 
Roman senator, who, upon being accused of professing Chris- 
tianity by his own servant, made a learned and eloquent apology 
for the Christian religion before the Senate. He was ordered 
to be executed, and a similar fate was awarded to his accuser 
under the law of Antoninus Pius. 

A fine statue of a bishop, sitting in his chair, was unearthed 
near Rome, in 155 1, and in 1842 a rich manuscript was found 
in the old Greek convent at Mount Athos. If the stone could 
speak it might tell us a wonderful history of battles with the 
great heretics and the small Roman bishops, who appear de- 
molished in the pages of the long-lost book. The voice of 



HIPPOLYTUS. % 39 

Hippolytus might assure us that he was a native of Italy, a 
student of Irenaeus, a traveler in the East in pursuit of knowl- 
edge, an elder at Rome, a pastor at Portus near the Tiber's 
mouth, and the writer of the long-desired " Refutation of All 
Heresies," heathen, Jewish, and Christian, from Thales down to 
Marcion. Two facts appear certain : that he did not regard the 
Roman bishops as popes, nor did any body else ; and that there 
had been a dearth of great men in the Church at Rome. In- 
fallibility was not their prelatic grace. Her pastors were as 
likely to become Montanists as was Tertullian. One of them 
would give his name to the Callistians whom we shall find 
charged with being Patripassians. Not one of these bishops 
was the equal of Hippolytus, "the first celebrated preacher of 
the West," and so intent upon good discipline and true doc- 
trine that he severely censured the lax morals and heretical 
tendencies of bishops Zephyrinus and Callistus. If he was 
under their ban, they were under his scourging pen. If he 
died in banishment by the malaria of Sardinia, or near Rome 
was torn in pieces by wild horses, about the year 235, he must 
have lived to an old age. Dr. Schaff says, "The Roman 
Church placed him in the number of her saints and martyrs, 
little suspecting that he would come forward in the nineteenth 
century as an accuser against her." 

Hippolytus was the friend of Origen, and like him was too 
much given to the allegorical method of interpreting Holy 
Scripture. These two men, deeply engaged in similar studies 
and contests with error, must have felt that each breathed a 
different air. At Rome there was strife ; at Alexandria, specu- 
lation. In one the bishop usurped too high an authority ; in 
the other the scholar bowed too low to philosophy. In the 
West there was coming more schism than heresy ; in the East, 
more heresy than pure missionary zeal. Certain Greeks were 
going beyond Scripture in doctrine ; the Italians, rising higher 
than the apostles in ecclesiastical power. 



NOTES. 

I. Gnosticism, a philosophy of religion and of the universe, claimed to 
supplement or supersede Christianity by a higher knowledge {gnosis). In 
it were blended four systems : Dualistic Parseeism, mangled Platonism, 



40 ,.. HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Judaism misunderstood, and Christianity grossly perverted. The prevalence 
of any one of these elements gave character to some form of the phi- 
losophy. The three leading questions pertained to the relation of God to 
the world, the origin of evil, and the person of Christ. Upon these bases 
various theories were proposed, and common to nearly all of them were the 
following principles: (i) Dualism, God and inorganic matter being eternal, 
unconnected, and antagonistic. (2) Matter is the seat of all sin and evil. 
(3) Between God and primal matter ( hyle) there is a series of aeons, or 
emanations ; the first proceeding from God, who dwells far remote from all 
material objects. From the first aeon others proceed, until the demiurge, 
world-creator, appears. He uses matter and creates the world. He is the 
Jehovah of the Old Testament. Most of the Gnostics regarded him as 
holding man in bondage to sin and matter by means of the Jewish system, 
which he invented. (4) To deliver man from sin, or from the demiurge, 
the aeon Christ {Logos) came into the world. (5) Christ either assumed an 
apparent body (Docetism), or entered into the man Jesus at baptism, acted 
sinlessly through Jesus, and left this human body just before the crucifixion 
(Ebionism). The Jews, incited by Jehovah, slew Jesus, but they could not 
touch the Christ. (6) Christ and another aeon, the Spirit [ftnejcma), rescue 
all spiritual souls from matter and sin, unite them to God, and save them 
by means of knowledge, self-denial, mortification of the body, self-atone- 
ment, or a purgatorial transmigration of souls. (7) As man has three natures, 
the material, psychical, and spiritual, so all men are divided into the same 
three classes; but only the spiritual can enter heaven; the psychical, by 
good works, may attain an intermediate state. 

The leading Gnostic schools : (a) Alexandrian or Jewish, represented 
by Basilides (130), Valentine who went to Rome, and Carpocrates who 
drifted into heathen licentiousness ; (b) The Syrian or anti- Jewish, repre- 
sented by Saturninus, of Antioch (125), Tatian, author of a Gospel har- 
mony (170), Bardesanes, of Edessa, a poet (170), and Marcion, who recog- 
nized the authority of Paul as opposed to Judaism. The Gnostics formed 
no sects, and their speculations died of exhaustion. 

II. Manichceism, a Persian form of Gnosticism, took its name from 
Mani, who seems to have been one of the Magi, half-converted to Chris- 
tianity. He was excommunicated by the Church, and finally flayed alive 
by a Persian king (277). His view was that Christ came to deliver the light 
from the darkness, good from evil, the human soul from sinful matter, man 
from Satan. The apostles misunderstood and falsified his doctrine. Mani 
was the promised Paraclete (not the Holy Ghost) appointed to restore the 
truth and the Church; hence, he was the head of the new Church. He 
devised an organization. Under him were his twelve apostles, seventy-two 
bishops, presbyters, deacons, and other officers. The elect were to practice 
rigid self-denial, abstinence, celibacy, and a secret worship. But they be- 
came corrupt and immoral. 

All these heretical teachers deceived their followers by employing Scrip- 
ture terms so artfully as to appear sound. They talked of Christ, redemp- 
tion, atonement, faith, holiness, and heaven, and insinuated their errors. 



NOTES TO CHAPTER II. 



41 



Bardesanes wrote hymns, which crept into some of the Syrian Churches, 
and his son adapted popular melodies to them. Gnosticism in all its forms 
was exposed and refuted by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement, and Augustine. 

III. Apologists, or writers of Christian defenses and evidences. Those 
of the second century were Quadratus (125), Aristides (125), Justin Martyr 
(148), Melito (166), Athenagoras (167), Miltiades, Apollinaris, Theophilus 
of Antioch, and Tatian. Then follow Clement, Tertullian, Arnobius, Minu- 
cius Felix, Origen, Lactantius, and Augustine. 

IV. The Catacombs, underneath part of Rome and vicinity, were long 
thought to be the old sand-pits or quarries, from which building materials 
were taken. But it is now held that they were the work of the Christians 
alone, and were first used for the burial of their dead, and then for refuge 
in times of persecution. The remains of dwellings and places of worship 
are found. The epitaphs are said to number seventy thousand; most 
of them illustrate a simple and pure Christianity, and testify against the 
later perversion of it. The catacombs at Naples have larger halls and finer 
galleries. Christian catacombs have been found in various cities, one at 
Syracuse and another at Alexandria. 



42 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



Chapter III. 

FROM CARTHAGE TO C^ESAREA. 

200-284. 

''Carthage must be destroyed," said the Romans, and the 
greatest city of Africa fell to the dust. "Carthage must be 
won to Christ," thought some unknown missionary, and she 
rose again to a nobler power and fame. Her ancient com- 
merce was a type of her vigorous Christianity. It enlisted 
men of all ranks. It extended to the towns and hamlets of 
that region, giving light and life to the old Punic slaves. One 
might almost think that Hannibal had reappeared in Tertullian, 
and at a holier altar sworn to break imperial tyranny, and 
carry the war into the very camps of paganism, if not resist the 
usurping bishops of Rome. He brings Carthage into Christian 
history, and stands as the first great orator of the Church, the 
boldest of the apologists, and the first of the Latin Fathers. 

Tertullian, born about 160, was the son of a Roman cap- 
tain serving at Carthage. He seems to have studied law and 
become a pleader. The stirring days of the forum were over; 
the bar sank into a police court. There was no liberty nor 
patriotism to evoke his eloquence. There were no Latin poets, 
essayists, and historians worth rivaling. He knew Greek, but 
in it his thoughts could not run rough, hot, fearless, and ter- 
rible. Lava never pours through golden pipes. His craving 
soul wanted stimulus. A reckless heathen, he acknowledged 
no moral restraint, nor any laws but those of rhetoric. He 
plunged into the worst excesses, for while sinning he sinned 
with all his might. He learned too well those social vices 
against which he would one day lift the trumpet and rout his 
old companions out of the dens of infamy, the circus, and the 
theater. Conscience whispered at times, and then came the 
Word of God. We know little of his spiritual history. At 
the age of thirty or forty he breaks upon our sight as a bold 



TERTULLIAN'S APOLOGY. 43 

Elijah. He carried very much of his ardor, impatience, inten- 
sity of love and hatred, harshness, and sarcasm into his relig- 
ious life. He presents, in his nature, the strong contrasts quite 
common to great men. Too impulsive to grasp the whole 
truth, or reason calmly in broad lines, he stands forth as the 
special pleader of the cause in hand, so carrying us by storm 
that we almost overlook his flourishes of rhetoric. When 
wrong he is to be pitied, when right he is tremendous. He 
was a rare genius, original and fresh, without his like in the 
ancient Church, the Luther of his time, with the ruder traits, 
but without the childlikeness, fatherly nature, homely love, and 
winning piety of the German hero. The one hurled scorn and 
defiance against cruel emperors, trod their edicts under foot, 
and wrote down heretics. The other shot thunder-bolts into the 
Vatican, threw papal bulls into the fire, and wrote down 
the monks. 

Tertullian gave to the Church the service of a fiery elo- 
quence. His writings glow with a heat that will never cool. 
He throws himself into his pages. The man is there, his pen 
still quivering with feeling. He was a bishop, with a wife at a 
time when clerical celibacy was growing in fashion ; but he 
grew rather strenuous for the innovation, and violent against 
second marriages. His numerous writings won such favor that 
his successor, Cyprian, often called for them, saying, ' ' Give 
me the master." They throw a strong light upon the state 
of the Church in his day. We read them, making due allow- 
ance for some extravagance of description. 

" Rulers of the Roman Empire,"* he thus begins his 
apology, ' ' you surely can not forbid the Truth to reach you 
by the secret pathway of a noiseless book. She knows that 
she is but a sojourner on the earth, and as a stranger finds 
enemies ; and more, her origin, her dwelling-place, her hope, 
her rewards, her honors, are above. One thing, meanwhile, 
she anxiously desires of earthly rulers — not to be condemned 
unknown. What harm can it do to give her a hearing? . . . 
The outcry is that the state is filled with Christians : that they 
are in the fields, in the citadels, in the islands. The lament is, 



* Septimius Severus was emperor, 193-21 1. Tertullian was writing about 
202, when Severus forbade any one to adopt Judaism or Christianity. 



44 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

as for some calamity, that both sexes, every age and condition, 
even high rank, are passing over to the Christian faith." 

The outcry is a confession and an argument for our cause ; 
for ' ' We are a people of yesterday, and yet we have filled every 
place belonging to you — cities, islands, castles, towns, assem- 
blies, your very camp, your tribes, companies, palace, senate, 
forum. We leave to you your temples alone. We can count 
your armies : our numbers in a single province will be greater. 
We have it in our power, without arms and without rebellion, 
to fight against you with the weapon of a simple divorce. We 
can leave you to wage your wars alone. If such a multitude 
should withdraw into some remote corner of the world you 
would doubtless tremble at your own solitude, and ask, 'Of 
whom are we the governors?' 

"It is a human right that every man should worship accord- 
ing to his own convictions; one man's religion neither harms 
nor helps another man. A forced religion is no religion at 
all. . . . Men say that the Christians are the cause of 
every public disaster. If the Tiber rises as high as the city 
walls, if the Nile does not rise over the fields, if the heavens 
give no rain, if there be an earthquake, if a famine or pesti- 
lence, straightway they cry, Away with the Christians to the 
Hon. . . . But go zealously on, ye good governors, you 
will stand higher with the people if you kill us, torture us, 
condemn us, grind us to dust; your injustice is the proof that 
we are innocent. God permits us to suffer. Your cruelty 
avails you nothing ; it is rather a temptation to us. The 
oftener you mow us down the more in number we grow ; 
the blood of Christians is seed. What you call our obsti- 
nacy is an instructor. For who that sees it does not inquire 
for what we suffer? Who that inquires does not embrace our 
doctrines? Who that embraces them is not ready to give his 
blood for the fullness of God's grace?" 

Temptations have borne down men whom threats could not 
scare. Such a man as Tertullian could face death like a hero, * 



* The martyrs at Carthage, in his time, left as bright a record as those at 
Lyons. There was a sublime fortitude manifested by several young catechu- 
mens (202-205), especially Perpetua, cherishing her infant, pitying her Christian 
mother, and resisting the entreaties of her aged pagan father, who took away 
her child; and Felicitas, who became a mother in a dungeon. After being 
mangled by wild beasts in the circus, they clasped each other, gave the Chris- 



MONTANISM. 45 

and yet be led into fanaticism. In Phrygia, the home of a sen- 
suous, mystical religion, Cybele was worshiped as the goddess 
of nature, the "great mother." On hills were her temples, in 
towns her oracles. Her priests were given to magic, trances, 
ecstasies, and perhaps clairvoyance. In their wild worship 
they beat cymbals, howled, and gashed themselves with knives. 
True Christianity may have seemed too tame for the people of 
such a country. The Church there was troubled with enthu- 
siasts of every grade. From them, it seems, came Montanus 
(170), who thought that there was little life in the Church. 
His pride, or zeal, carried him away. He began to be in 
trances, raptures, ecstasies, in which he uttered what were taken 
to be prophecies. He claimed inspiration. Among those 
whom he drew to him were two women of rank, Priscilla and 
Maximilla, whose "spiritual gifts" were his powerful aids. 
Here were the three pillars of the sect. After them were to 
be "no more inspired prophets." Tertullian mentions a 
woman who, in her trances, was consulted for revelations as to 
the unseen world, and for medical prescriptions. Montanus 
asserted that he was nothing but a medium, having no will or 
word of his own. In the name of the Paraclete he said : 
' ' Behold, the man is as a lyre, and I sweep over him as the 
plectrum. The man sleeps; I wake." 

The utterances of these fanatics related to supposed reforms 
in the Church, to more rigid discipline, to fasting and ascetic 
practices, to the speedy coming of the Lord, and to the awful 
judgments about to fall from heaven ; of course, also to their 
own ability to lead back the Church to primitive purity. They 
assumed to be "the spiritual," and all who did not follow them 
were carnal, and fearfully dead. Their sect spread rapidly 
through Asia Minor, and into North Africa. It was the more 
welcome and dangerous for these reasons: 1. It professed to 
agree with the truly catholic Church in all her doctrines; and 
yet it regarded Christianity as incomplete, and in need of fur- 
ther revelations. 2. It pretended to carry with it a revival of 
the apostolic gifts,* agencies, discipline, and life — a restoration 



tian kiss, parted, but not forever, and received the merciful blow that ended 
their horrible tortures. Their husbands seem to have been heartless pagans, 
and may have been praised by the Emperor Severus. 
* On the continuance of miracles, see Note I. 



46 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of the apostolic Church. 3. It reacted against Gnosticism, and 
passed to the opposite extreme. When some men devote 
themselves to strong thinking, others grow zealous for much 
working. Even sound theology is rated below the practical 
spirit. It flattered those who imagined they were seeking a 
spotless Church, in which they might develop their gifts. It 
drew those who craved excitement. 

Tertullian must have looked upon the fairest side of Mon- 
tanism. But he embraced it in its full rigor before its founder 
had been ejected from the Church.* Never abandoning his 
general orthodoxy, and still defending Christianity, he forsook 
its communion, f Whether he was ever restored is doubtful. 
He grew ascetic and censorious. He regarded flight from per- 
secution as worse than a denial of Christ under torture. To 
court persecution was esteemed a virtue. Those who lapsed 
were unpardonable. The Church could not remit sins com- 
mitted after baptism, and hence he opposed infant baptism. 
After him a sect was named the " Tertullianists. " Other Mon- 
tanists regarded Pepuzi, in Phrygia, as their New Jerusalem, the 
seat of their millennial kingdom. We can hardly think that 
Tertullian adopted all their absurdities. He did not assert him- 
self as a prophet. He appears to have died in his eightieth year. 

If any pagan lawyers and rhetoricians of Carthage made the 
name of Tertullian a jest, we may -imagine Cyprian laughing 
among them, so long as he loved his vices as a part of himself. 
The aged presbyter, Cecilius, led him to the truth in the year 
246, and, when dying, committed his wife and children to the 
new convert. Cyprian, about forty-six years of age, % sold his 



* Compare Zinzendorf and Edward Irving, whose course was not more 
strange. Bunsen supposes that animal magnetism was at the bottom of Mon- 
tanism. It has been compared with some forms of modern "spiritism." 

t Jerome ascribes his defection to the harsh and insulting conduct of the 
Roman bishops. This is quite as probable as that he was nettled by the failure 
to be elected bishop of either Rome or Carthage, and seceded in disgust. He 
certainly protested against the lax doctrine and discipline of the Roman bishops, 
whom Hippolytus censured. 

% He had seen no imperial persecutions by Caracalla (211-17), Elagabahis 
(218-22), and Alexander Severus (222-35). But this rest of twenty-five years 
was broken by the savage Maximin (235-38). Again the Church had rest under 
Gordian (238-44) and Philip the Arabian (244-49), until Decius (249-51) raged 
violently against it. These emperors will be noticed more fully in connection 
with Origen, who had closer contact with most of them. 



THREE QUESTIONS— TWO SCHISMS. 47 

villa and gardens (afterwards restored to him by friends), gave 
the price to the relief of the poor, was ordained a presbyter, and 
within three years was elected Bishop of Carthage in the very 
face of his own protests. In that office he spent the remaining 
ten years of his life. While he developed the tendencies to 
prelacy, he was the model of a pastor. The Church of Africa 
suffered greatly in the general persecution by Decius (249-51). 
For a time Cyprian prudently retreated from the storm ; but by 
his pen he was in active service to his flock. For this he was 
charged with cowardice by men who thought flight a sin and a 
fall unpardonable. But on his return, when a fearful pestilence 
raged in the city, no man was more courageous. The heathen 
left their sick to die and the dead unburied, saying, "The 
Christians are the cause of the plague." The bishop assembled 
his flock ; they collected funds, provided all sorts of relief, and 
proved their faith by their splendid charity. 

Three questions greatly disturbed the Churches of North 
Africa and Rome : 

1. Should the lapsed* of any class, be restored to the 
Church, upon their repentance ? It is curious to find this ques- 
tion giving life to two schisms, one holding the reverse of the 
other in regard to the lapsed. They agreed in opposing what 
they considered to be high assumptions of prelacy. At Car- 
thage Cyprian first opposed the restoration of the lapsed ; but 
he so modified his views as to admit them if they proved to be 
truly penitent. He was vigorously opposed by Novatus and 
Felicissimus, who had already refused to acknowledge him as 
their bishop, and had set up an independent Church and bishop 
of their own. To them flocked the lapsed in great numbers, 
and no sort of penance was required of them. They were the 
liberalists in discipline. But at Rome the bishop, Cornelius, 
was stoutly opposed for his leniency towards the lapsed. No- 
vatian, a learned, earnest, gloomy man, had protested against 
his election ; and now he was joined by Novatus, who had left 

* Those who secured safety either by actually sacrificing, or by offering 
incense to the heathen gods, or by certificates {libellos) purchased with money 
(which was done by bribing the magistrates to certify that they had offered 
sacrifice, though they had not done so), were distinguished by the opprobrious 
names of " Sacrificers" (Sacrificatores) , "Incensers" (Thttrificatores), and "Cer- 
tificated" {Libellatici) . Those who were thus chargeable with defection were 
called lapsed or fallen Christians. 



48 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

his former principles at Carthage, and adopted the reverse at 
Rome. They led off a party, and Novatian was unwillingly 
made their bishop. They were extremely severe towards the 
lapsed, and unchurched all Churches which admitted them or 
any other such gross offenders. Many ' 'confessors," so called 
because they had been on the very brink of martyrdom, joined 
in this schism. These Novatians, rightly protesting against 
certain errors, claimed to be the Cathari, or Puritans of the 
time. They took up the older African notion that those who 
committed gross sins after baptism should be forever excluded 
from the Church. This was enough to cause infant baptism to 
be neglected. They rebaptized all who united with them. 
They were the forerunners of the Donatists. Cyprian took the 
side of Cornelius in this hot controversy, which continued long 
after they were both martyrs for the truth of Christ. 

2. Should baptism by heretics and schismatics be held 
valid ? Cyprian thought not ; Stephen, the new Bishop of 
Rome, contended for its validity. Thus Cyprian had against 
him the schismatics at home, the Novatians, and the Catholics 
at Rome. The validity of baptism did not depend on the 
mode, for immersion, pouring, and sprinkling were recognized ; 
nor upon age, for the most orthodox baptized infants. The 
question put to Cyprian in regard to infant baptism was simply 
this, Whether it should be administered before the child was 
eight days old ? He thought there need be no such delay, and 
the Council of Carthage (255) fully agreed with him.* 

3. Was the Bishop of Rome the sovereign over all other 
bishops? Was he what was afterwards called a pope? Ste- 
phen assumed high power. He ordered a synod in Spain to 
restore to their Churches two bishops whom it had deposed. 
Cyprian regarded this as high-handed arrogance. No one was 
rightly "the bishop of bishops." This bears strongly against 
the later papacy. But Cyprian claimed to be more than a 
simple presbyter. He was a prelate, and he regarded all pre- 
latic bishops as equally the successors of the apostles. He 
thought that the Roman bishop was the center of unity in the 
Church, but all others had equal power with him. He was not 
a sovereign. The highest power of the Church resided in the 



* Chap. IV, Note III. 



ALEXANDRIA. 



49 



c-ouncils of her bishops. Down to the time when the Vandals 
almost ruined the Church of North Africa, she resisted the 
growing pretensions of Rome. 

The severe edicts of Valerian (254-260) did not spare Cyp- 
rian. He was banished for a time, and finally confined to the 
narrow limits of his house and garden. There he was seized, 
in the year 258, and led before an officer. The sentence upon 
him was, ''That Thrascius Cyprian, having long been a ring- 
leader in impiety against the gods of Rome, and having resisted 
the efforts of emperors to reclaim him, shall be beheaded for 
his offenses, and as a warning to his followers." Some of his 
flock said, aloud, "Let us go and die with him." He knelt in 
prayer at the block, bound his eyes with his own hands, the sword 
fell, and there rolled into the dust the head of a prince in the 
Church, a father to those in poverty, widowhood, and orphanage, 
one of the most practical writers and the greatest bishop of the £ 
third century. Four years before his burial a gentler hand 
had taken home Origen, the greatest scholar of the third ^ 
century. 

A full account of Origen would involve the history of four 
great subjects: 1. The culture of Alexandria. 2. The devel- 
opment of a new eclectic philosophy, Neo-Platonism, founded 
largely upon the teachings of Plato and Philo Judaeus. It 
appears in three schools — the pagan, whose teachers were Am- 
monius Saccas, Plotinus, and Porphyry ; the Gnostic, in which 
were Basilides and his followers ; the Christian, elevated by 
Pantsenus, Clement, and Origen. 3. The mutual influences of 
this philosophy and Christianity upon each other, with the result- 
ant errors and heresies. 4. The doctrine of the Logos in these 
schools, and in the current and later theology.* 

Alexandria had become the center of a vast commerce and 
a high culture. In no other harbor could so many ships lie 
anchored, and this was a type of her social and intellectual 
haven, for there were represented nearly all nations, languages, 
literatures, philosophies, and religions. Students consulted the 
largest library in the world. Greek, Jew, Parsee, Brahmin, 
and Christian heard their beliefs discussed in the academy of 
scholars. Learned lecturers sought to fuse the best principles 
of all creeds, and form a new philosophy. The elements of an 

*Note II. 



50 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

eclectic religion were afloat in the air. The Christian Church 
was not thrust into a corner to be the contempt of eight hun- 
dred thousand people. Her mental culture won respect. 

The pagan wing of this new philosophy had its active 
school and eminent teachers. All religions were regarded by 
them as having something divine, while no one was supposed 
to possess a full and sufficient revelation. Hence, ideas were 
borrowed from one to fill up the deficiencies of the other. 
Plato was preferred to all other philosophers. They looked 
upon his opinions concerning God, the human soul, and things 
invisible, as conformable to the spirit and genius of Christianity. 
Ammonius Saccas (sack-bearer in youth), who had been a 
member of the Church, and may have made pretensions to 
Christianity all his life, was one of the principal patrons, if not 
the founder, of this system. This scheme was taken up by 
Plotinus, a wonderful student, a traveler in search of the pri- 
meval religion, and a theorist who imitated Plato's method 
without Plato's mind. In his view Christ was one of the great 
sages who left behind him one of the great moral systems. 
He aimed to find or to found a universal religion,* but in it 
Christianity was accommodated to paganism. Thus an exam- 
ple was given of the honesty of those eclectics who borrowed 
from Christ almost every thing but the essentials of the Gospel. 
They used Christian words, but clung to pagan doctrines. 
They may not have suspected the miserable result. Reverent 
Saccas may not have dreamed of a scoffing Porphyry as the 
child of his philosophy. 

Probably Athenagoras, the elegant apologist, had raised the 
catechetical school to a high rank. It was first intended for 
the instruction of children and converts in the simple truths 
of the Bible. It grew into an academy of science and theology. 
Pantaenus renounced his stoic philosophy and made this the 
most eminent school in the whole Church. He left it, for a 
time, to bear the Gospel into Arabia or India. Its next presi- 
dent, in 189, was Clement, a convert from heathenism, who 
had traveled widely in search of truth, and now sought to con- 
struct a universal philosophy, with Christianity as its founda- 
tion. Pantaenus had taught him that the nobler systems 
of pagan thought need not be treated as idols and broken in 

♦Compare Theodore Parker and Chunder Sen. 



C LEMENT— ORIGEN. 



51 



shivers, but the truths in them should be brought into the 
service of Christ. In his view philosophy was a schoolmaster 
leading serious pagans unconsciously to the Redeemer. Plato 
prepared the world for Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles ; 
yet Jesus Christ must be supreme. "I am well assured," he 
wrote, "that the momentous thing is to live by the Word 
{Logos) and enter into his Spirit." He too often interpreted 
the Bible allegorically. * With all his errors he positively set 
aside no essential doctrine of Christianity. He represented the 
Christian side, and Plotinus the pagan side of the same phi- 
losophy. But he saw no virtue in the common life of the 
heathen. In his "Exhortation to the Greeks" are some of 
the most withering exposures of the pagan vices, luxury, 
licentiousness, and imposture. He sets forth Christ, the Son of 
God, as the only redeemer from sin and woe. The "In- 
structor" was written to teach converts the true faith, morals, 
and manners of a Christian. The "Stromata," or Tapestries, 
are like the varied articles of a literary magazine written to 
promote culture, truth, and piety. His aim was to live and 
labor for the highest good of his age. 

In this atmosphere Origen was born, in 185, of Christian 
parents. Leonides thanked God for such a brilliant son, stored 
his memory with holy Scripture, tried to answer his deep ques- 
tions, chided his prying curiosity, and often went to his sleep- 
ing boy and kissed his breast as a temple of the Holy Ghost. 
Origen was placed in the school of Clement, with bright pros- 
pects until the days of trial came. 

Startling events occurred. The good governor Philip, his 
wife, and daughter forsook the pagan temples and trusted in 
the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The emperor Septimius Severus 
(193-21 1) heard of these conversions, and wrote to Philip, "Is 
this the return you make for my kindness? I gave you almost 
the highest post which I could bestow. I honored you rather 
as a king than a prefect, and while you retained the faith of 
your forefathers you were worthy of this dignity. Abandon 
at once this superstition or be deprived of your office." Philip 



* " With expositors of this school, every passage in Scripture contained 
three meanings — one, literal or historical; another, conveying a moral lesson; 
and a third, mystical or spiritual; answering respectively to the body, soul, and 
spirit in man." 



52 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

bestowed his property upon the poor rather than have it con- 
fiscated, and then replied that he expected to live and die in 
the Christian faith. A more confirmed heathen was sent to 
take his office, with orders to destroy Philip. Hired ruffians 
slew him in his own house. 

Meanwhile Severus, no longer grateful to the Christian 
physician who had cured his dangerous malady, published an 
edict more intolerant than any that had preceded it. He may 
have been alarmed by the excesses of the Montanists, or 
sought revenge upon Jews and Christians for refusing to serve in 
his armies. He forbade every subject of the empire to embrace 
Judaism or Christianity on pain of death and confiscation of 
property. A seven years' war upon the Church was begun in 
various quarters. It was most severe at Alexandria, which he 
visited, and at Carthage. Leonides was thrown into prison. 
Origen wrote to him, "My father, flinch not because of us." 
This appeal from a wife and seven children went to his soul. 
The lad of seventeen, who sent it, would have gone to die with 
his father had not his mother forbidden, wept, entreated, and 
finally hid his clothes. Leonides was beheaded, his property 
confiscated, and his family thrown into poverty. The heroic 
struggles of young Origen were in resisting a worse wolf than 
hunger, for his benefactors tried to lure him into heresy. But 
he saw Gnosticism concealed under pious phrase, and hated it. 
He manfully left a rich protectress, and earned his bread by 
teaching grammar. He spent some leisure hours in the school 
of Saccas. He heard lectures from the returned Pantaenus. 
He bade farewell to Clement, who retired from the persecution 
into Cappadocia, and there ended his days. 

At the age of eighteen Origen began to teach the pupils 
whom Clement had left. He was soon chosen to be the prin- 
cipal of the first Christian school in the world. He had no 
lack of students. He sold his grammars and books of phi- 
losophy, and applied himself to the study of theology. He 
sought it in the Bible. He endured hatred. The governors 
went on in their work of torture and death. Some of his 
pupils were arrested. He visited them in prison, or consoled 
them at the block, at the risk of life. When wrathful pagans 
hurled stones at him he did not flinch. Scarcely a house was a 
safe refuge for him, until many pagans began to respect his 



PORPHYRY. 53 

courage and his learning. He did not seek martyrdom. One 
day he was seized and dragged to the temple of Serapis. 
Palms were put in his hands and he was ordered to lay them 
on the altar of the god. Waving them, he shouted, "Here 
are the triumphal boughs, not of the idol, but of Christ." 

He won the name of Adamantius, the hero of iron and 
brass, whose labors were stupendous. He was too severe upon 
himself, too literal in crucifying the body. He made life 
intense, ate sparingly, took no anxious thought of the morrow, 
had but one coat, went barefoot, caught short sleep on a rough 
board, taught by day, and gave most of the night to prayer 
and study, especially the deep search into Holy Scripture. 
He says, "When I had given myself entirely to the Word of 
God, and when the reputation of my learning had gone abroad, 
a great many heretics, men versed in Greek science, came to 
listen to me. I thought it my duty to master the dogmas of 
heresy, as well as all truth that philosophers have laid claim to 
tell." His learning became prodigious. He was an author 
and teacher, rather than a preacher. He could dictate to 
seven amanuenses at once. Jerome said, "He wrote more than 
another man could read." The influence of Pantsenus, if not 
of Saccas and Plotinus, is seen in his writings. Once, when in 
Rome, he entered a hall, and the lecturer, Plotinus himself, 
rose from his chair, saying, ' ' I can not proceed before one who 
knows more than I can tell him." 

Origen must have been pained to see his pupil, the clever 
Porphyry, feed on the husks of paganism. This philosopher 
edited Plotinus, imitated Celsus, lost himself in the mists of 
gloom, and thought of suicide as the shortest way to a happier 
life, and in Sicily he breathed out his hatred to Christianity in 
a book. He was the boldest, unfairest enemy the Church had 
yet seen in the form of a man. His chief aim was to make 
the Bible incredible. He subjected it to a sort of pedantic 
criticism, which has been revived in modern times. Thus, in 
the reaction of paganism against Christianity, the rationalists 
were followed by the infidels and scoffers. Later still, one wing 
of this school struck more wicked, though weaker, blows upon 
the Church, when Philostratus brought forward Apollonius, of 
Tyana, as a rival of Christ, and Hierocles assailed the moral 
character of Jesus. The latter pleased himself better when he 



54 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

dropped his futile pen, and wielded the sword against the 
Church in the time of Diocletian. To all this the book 
of Origen, which exposed the errors and slanders of Celsus, 
was a quite sufficient answer. He placed Christianity upon its 
historical foundations. 

Origen was still a layman. He was sent to explain the 
Christian doctrines to the governor of Arabia. Still later, 
when his life was in danger, and Heraclas took charge of the 
school, he visited Palestine. Bishops and pastors were de- 
lighted with the most learned teacher they had ever seen. At 
Csesarea they requested him to expound the Holy Scriptures in a 
public assembly. Thus he was laying the foundations of a 
theological school in that city. But these lectures proved the 
beginning of his troubles. Demetrius, the bishop of Alex- 
andria, heard of them and protested, saying, ''Never before 
has a layman delivered discourses in the presence of bishops. 
It is irregular." The bishops who had welcomed Origen cited 
cases to sustain him. Lay-preaching had been allowed in 
Asia Minor. He was not intruding upon their rights nor into 
their dioceses. The jealous Demetrius finally sent some deacons 
to bring Origen back to his own city, and he went. For some 
years he devoted himself to Biblical studies. 

The Emperor Elagabalus (218-222), a Syrian debauchee, 
and priest of the sun-worship,* hoped to see all religions 
merged into his system, with all its social abominations. Tol- 
erating all beliefs, he practiced none. His cousin, Julia Mam- 
maea, "a very devout woman," if not a Christian, wished to 
save her son, the heir to the throne, from the blasting sins 
of the imperial court. When she was at Antioch she invited 
Origen to come and teach them the Gospel more perfectly. 
He was escorted thither by her own military guard. Thus 
Alexander Severus (222-235) was brought somewhat under the 
influence of Origen. He was an excellent prince. The laws 
against Christians were not repealed, but rather ignored. In a 
few places the mob raged against them. He had Christians in 
his household. It seems that for the first time bishops were 
allowed at court. It is said that he inscribed the Golden Rule 
upon the walls of his palace and on public buildings. At 
Rome a small piece of ground, used as a commons, was 

*So his name indicates, El-Gabal, or Heliogabalus. 



DEMETRIUS. 55 

desired by the Christians as the site for a church, and by a 
company of victualers for an inn. Alexander granted it to the 
former, saying that any religious use of it was better than the 
conversion of it to a tavern. Here seems to be one of the 
first historical references to a church as a publicly consecrated 
building. For about two centuries private houses, halls, or 
synagogues were the places of worship. Out of this may have 
grown the story that the emperor thought of enrolling Christ 
among the gods, and rearing a temple to him. He was an 
eclectic, a sage-worshiper, one to be admired by the Neopla- 
tonists, for he placed in his pagan chapel the busts of Christ, 
Abraham, Orpheus, Apollonius of Tyana, and Serapis, along 
with those of the Roman gods and emperors. In a campaign 
against the Germans he was slain in his tent by the agents of an 
old Thracian soldier, the giant Maximin, who took the throne. 
Origen had been invited to rout certain heretics out of 
Greece. Demetrius gave him letters of commendation as a 
layman famous for refuting errorists. On his way he stopped 
at Caesarea. The bishops of that city and of Jerusalem, mindful 
of the check put upon his lay-preaching among them, ordained 
him a presbyter. This irregular act* highly offended Deme- 
trius, who scarcely waited for Origen to return from Greece. 
A sharp controversy began. One result was that the great 
teacher was arraigned before councils, charged with a youthful 
indiscretion and contempt of his bishop. These were, doubt- 
less, more strongly urged than certain errors then found in his 
writings, if they have not since been interpolated. He held 
the pre-existence of human souls, and the final redemption of 
all men and devils, except Satan. He was not always clear 
upon the doctrine of Christ's equality with the Father, though 
he often affirmed it distinctly. He speculated too wildly upon 
the creation and the fall of man. But the envy and hatred of 
his bishop seem to have turned the scale, and he was removed 
from the school which was sending out men to become eminent 
in the Church. He was deposed from the ministry, and excom- 
municated from the Christian fold, "to which he had gained 
so many adherents, to teach the world how much it costs a 



*It is doubtful whether there was then any law against ordaining a man in 
a diocese to which he had not taken his membership. The "Apostolic 
Canons" are not regarded as genuine. 



$6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

man to serve steadfastly the cause of liberty." He was even 
forbidden to reside in Alexandria. Perhaps the sentence was 
removed by a gentler bishop. Already he had taken refuge at 
Caesarea. There he labored chiefly for twenty years. To its 
theological school he secured fame and patronage. Young 
men were attracted to him by his pure and noble life, and then 
led into the ministry of the Gospel. 

The terrible Maximin (235-238) melted down even golden 
gods for his own uses, listened to the slanders brought against 
the Church, put to death the favorites of Alexander, and ban- 
ished those whom he had promoted. In the midst of so much 
cruelty and bloodshed, no wonder that the savage included 
Christians in his persecution. It was directed chiefly against 
the ministers of the Church, as the pillars and propagators of 
Christianity. Origen concealed himself in Cappadocia for about 
two years. Even there he found manuscripts for his great 
polyglot Bible. They were given him by the noble Juliana, 
whose father had been a translator of the Septuagint. 

He returned to Caesarea when Philip the Arabian took the 
throne (244-249). Jerome calls him the first Christian emperor; 
but his personal vices were a bar to that honor. He and his 
wife, Severa, received letters from Origen, who says elsewhere 
that God had given the Christians freedom in religion, and he 
anticipates the conversion of the empire. This hope, rarely 
indulged, was soon changed to fear, when Decius (249-251) 
attempted a wholesale destruction of the Church. In vain had 
Septimius Severus threatened death to all who adopted Chris- 
tianity. A new policy was now inaugurated. Christians were 
to be hunted out. Accusers ran no risk by acting as spies, 
informers, and slanderers. Popular clamor took the place of a 
trial. It was enough for a disciple to show himself; any one 
might strike him down. Christianity itself was a crime, be- 
cause of its triumphs over paganism. Decius, it is said, was 
so enraged to see the religion of the empire trodden under foot 
and undermined by a proscribed sect, that he issued edicts to the 
governors of provinces, commanding them to proceed against the 
Christians with the utmost severity, to spare no kind of tor- 
ments, and put to death all who refused to sacrifice to the gods. 
Nothing can be imagined more dismal than the storm which 
followed in all parts of the empire ; the heart sickens at the 



DEATH OF ORIGEN. 



57 



recital of the diversified tortures to which the Christians were 
exposed. Some few apostatized. The persecution was especially 
directed against the clergy and teachers of the faith. Origen was 
tortured in a dungeon at Tyre, and never recovered from the 
racking. Fabian was a martyr at Rome. Cyprian was in exile 
from Carthage. The bishops of Jerusalem and Antioch died 
in prison. The Bishop of Smyrna was the only one who apos- 
tatized. This is usually regarded as the first persecution which 
was really general. " There was general confusion and con- 
sternation," says an old writer; "the laws of nature and hu- 
manity were trodden under foot; friend betrayed his friend, 
brother his brother, and children their parents, every man 
being afraid of his nearest relations. By this means the woods 
and mountains became full, the cities and towns empty." 
Many remained in the deserts, and became hermits and monks. 

The Church was not annihilated. Cyprian thought she 
needed this fiery trial to purify her from errors in doctrine and 
laxity in discipline. Valerian (252-260) saw that the Decian 
policy was defeating itself; for there were too many kindly and 
self-interested pagans to allow their harmless neighbors to be 
murdered on such a scale. He decreed that pastors and teach- 
ers should be removed, and their flocks prevented from holding 
meetings of every kind. But his edicts of banishment, confis- 
cation, and death brought no real victories to paganism. Pas- 
tors were often too much beloved, even by the heathen, to be 
slain in cold blood. Many who were driven away were followed 
by their flocks, and they found Christ and his Church in the 
wilderness. Some carried the Gospel where it had never yet 
gone. Among the eminent martyrs were Cyprian, already 
named, Sixtus of Rome, and his deacon, St. Lawrence, whom 
legend associates with the gridiron on which he was roasted to 
death. The story is that, when he was asked by the gold- 
hunting magistrates for the treasures of the Church, he pointed 
to the sick and the poor as her jewels. 

In the year 254 there might have been seen, at Tyre, a 
little man of about seventy, worn, weary, bent under a load of 
censures, broken by study and tortures, thinking of the storm 
and of Christ who would still it, and saying, ' ' A stranger in a 
world that hates us, we commit ourselves to him who overcame 
it, and told us to be of good cheer." There he died, and on 



58 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the tomb that long stood over his grave was his name, Origen. 
And men came to think that he was the wonder of his aee in 
scholarship, and the most genial of the early fathers.* 

When Origen was entering upon his vast labors in Biblical 
science, he formed a most timely friendship. A rich Alexan- 
drian came to him, told him how he had been lured into Gnos- 
ticism, and how his conscience would give him no rest. The 
wanderer was restored to the fold. In gratitude he offered his 
home to the scholar and his fortune to the cause. He sup- 
plied him with seven secretaries, besides a goodly number of 
copyists. We may forget how rapidly books could be made 
in those days. Origen says of this generous helper : ■ ' The 
pious Ambrose, who has devoted himself to God, thinking that 
I loved work, has convinced me by his zeal and love for the 
Sacred Scriptures. . . . We never cease comparing texts; 
we discuss them at meals; at once we return to our studies, 
and diligently correct manuscripts." Here was something like 
a Christian monastery, a foreshadowing of Port Royal. The 
death of Ambrose left him in poverty, and still he toiled on. 
Origen was ''the creator of a scientific exegesis" and a Biblical 
criticism. Despite his allegorical method, and his search for 
hidden meanings, he tried to bring out the true sense, and was 
the first who had the idea of a real commentary on the Bible. 
He formed the Hexapla, a polyglot in six columns, contain- 
ing the original text in Hebrew and Greek characters, with 
four Greek versions of the Septuagint. To this work, now al- 
most all lost, he devoted twenty-eight years. The canon of 
the New Testament was so well settled that he names nearly 
all the books which we acknowledge as inspired, f The several 
ancient versions prove that the early Church gave the Bible to 
the people in their own languages. 

* Among his pupils were such eminent bishops as Heraclas and Dionysius 
of Alexandria, Methodius of Tyre, and Firmilian of Neo-Csesarea ; also Gregory, 
the wonder-worker in Pontus ; Paraph il us, the famous scholar of Caesarea; and 
Julius Africanus, one of the earliest chronographers. Beryllus, Bishop of Bostra, 
who denied that there were three persons in the Godhead, was convinced of his 
error by Origen. The great teacher has been called the Schleiermacher of the 
Greek Church, guiding heretics and rationalists to the Christian faith. Both 
these men have had followers who carried their erroneous opinions to an extreme. 

tThe earliest complete lists, preserved, of the Books of the New Testament 
were given by Athanasius and Jerome (325-420), but all the books had been 
acknowledged as canonical before the year 180. 



CHRISTIANITY LEGALIZED— MONARCHIANS. 59 

At length Christianity was declared to be a religio licita by 
the Emperor Gallienus (260-268), when he saw that his father 
had prospered so long as he favored its adherents. For the 
first time it was blessed with an edict of toleration. It was. a 
lawful religion. The Church was a lawful society. A long rest 
from persecution was begun. The only .emperor who ventured 
to break this peace of forty years was Aurelian (270-275), but 
he was assassinated before his edict produced much effect. In 
275 the Emperor Tacitus revoked it. For many years foreign 
wars diverted the attention of rulers from the Church. 

While the empire sat still, washing the blood off her weary 
hands, the Church was threatened with an invasion of heresies. 
The most serious of them had reference to Christ and the 
Trinity.* Their projectors are usually called Monarchians. It 
is sufficient to arrange them in two classes, and name the chief 
advocates from the leading principle in the theories by which 
they sought to maintain the divine unity {inonarchid) : 

1. The Dynamists, who held that the Logos in Jesus was a 
force, or power, as reason is in us. This power was not a 
person ; not the personal and eternal Son of God. Their text 
was, "Christ the power of God." But he was only a divinely 
endowed man. They were little more than humanitarians. 
The Alogi (170) denied the personality of the Logos. Theo- 
dotus (195), a learned tanner, lapsed under persecution, and 
when charged with having denied the Lord said, ' ' I denied not 
God, but man." Artemon (202) gave his name to many of 
these heretics. Paul of Samosata stands in the transition from 
this class to the next. He was Bishop of Antioch (260), and 
also held a civil office. This rich, pompous man, who put his 
doctrines into song, and wished the people to applaud loudly 
his sermons, maintained that the spirit of the Father had de- 
scended upon Jesus, dwelt within him (but without any per- 
sonal union), and empowered him to work miracles and instruct 



* The word triad was used as early as the year 180, by Theophilus of Anti- 
och, and trinitas by Tertullian, to describe the three persons of the Trinity. It 
was no new doctrine. By that time, probably, the catechumen entered into 
Church membership, confessing his faith in "God the Father Almighty, and in 
his Son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost." Out of such a form, doubtless, 
grew the so-called Apostles' Creed. Doctrines are usually believed for a long 
time before they are formulated by the Church. See Note II. 



f 



60 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

mankind; and that in this sense he is called the Son of God.* 
Ancient writers have accused this heretical bishop of framing 
his doctrine to please Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who then 
had possession of Antioch, and favored Judaism. The council 
which deposed him (269) began by addressing to him a letter 
affirming the essential divinity of Christ ; his eternal pre-exist- 
ence ; his creation of the world ; his relation to God as a son, 
not as a creature ; and his miraculous incarnation. 

2. The Modalists, who asserted that God was one person, 
yet he had manifested himself in a trinity of successive modes. 
In one mode, or phase, or stage of evolution he was the Fa- 
ther ; in another, the Son ; in a third, the Holy Spirit. Praxeas 
(200) was charged with saying that with Jesus pater natus, pater 
passus — the Father was born, the Father suffered ; hence the 
name of the sect, Patripassians. Hippolytus asserts that with 
this doctrine Noetus of Smyrna insnared Callistus, Bishop of 
Rome (220) ; hence the Callistians. Before this bishop was 
deposed he won to his views the most famous of the Modalists, 
Sabellius, who became a presbyter in Egypt. There he clothed 
his doctrine in new terms. It seemed profound. The Patri- 
passians held that the Father personally assumed the human 
nature of Jesus. Sabellius (260) asserted that as light and 
heat emanate from the sun, so two powers or energies proceed 
from the Divine Essence, and these are the Logos and the 
Holy Ghost. They are virtually God manifesting himself by 
evolving or extending his essence. Sabellius was excommuni- 
cated by a council at Alexandria. His doctrine was meant to 
explain, not to deny, the true divinity of our Lord.t 

One man was eminent in his efforts to heal divisions and 
refute heresies. A learned rhetorician, craving for something 
better than pagan philosophy, had a book given him by a poor 
woman. He found it to be the Epistles of St. Paul. He 
studied it, attended the school of Origen, whom he succeeded 
as a teacher, became Bishop of Alexandria (248-264), and is 
known as Dionysius the Great. In mind, wide research, and 
simplicity of life, he was like Origen. In experience, episcopal 
ability, moderation, perils, banishments, generosity, and charity, 
he was like Cyprian. The influence of his self-denial and ami- 

* Compare the doctrine of the modern Socinians. 

f Compare the Christology of Swedenborg and Schleiermacher. 



NOTES TO CHAPTER III. 6 1 

ability was widely felt. He was scarcely less earnest for the 
true nature of Christ (after an error was renounced) than for 
the spirituality of his kingdom. Since the time of Papias, who 
claimed to have been a disciple of the Apostle John, there had 
been a growing hope that the Lord would soon return to the 
earth, deliver his persecuted Church, and establish a Millennial 
reign of glory. The Montanists had zealously proclaimed it. 
Sounder men, such as Justin Martyr and Irenseus, had used 
language which seemed to favor the doctrine. But the Mil- 
lenarians had become gross and sensual in their ideas and 
hopes. Origen had been the most vigorous opponent of them. 
In Egypt a strong body of them had their learned bishop, 
Nepos, a writer of hymns. Dionysius replied to his book, 
went to Arsinoe, debated three days with his successor, Cora- 
cion, won him from his earthly notions, taught the people that 
Christ's kingdom was spiritual, and came away with the hearty 
thanks of the leaders of the converted Millenarian party. In 
his letter to Stephen of Rome he says : i ' Know that all the 
Churches in the East, and those beyond, which have been sep- 
arated, are now returned to unity. Their presidents think one 
and the same thing, and greatly rejoice in the surprising return 
of peace and love." 



NOTES. 

I. The continuance of miracles. Three views have been held: (i) That 
the power of working miracles still exists in the true Church; this is the 
opinion of Romanists. (2) That this power ceased at the death of the 
apostles. (3) That it gradually died away after the time of the apostles. 
This last opinion was generally held by Protestants until 1748, when Dr. 
Conyers Middleton published his '* Free Inquiry," and it still has supporters. 
The second view seems now to be more prevalent among Protestants. 

II. The key to many errors in the ancient Church is the signification 
given to the term Logos. It had these meanings, simply stated: (1) 
"World -soul," or universal reason; a pantheistic idea. (2) A God -given 
power, impersonal, and especially bestowed upon Jesus Christ ; so held by 
the Dynamists. (3) An emanation from God, or ^Eon, personal, but not 
eternal ; so many of the Gnostics taught. (4) The Son of God, begotten 
of him before all ages, but not eternal; Arianism. (5) A manifestation, 
development, or evolution of God, the Son being virtually identical with the 
Father ; so the Patripassians and Sabellians held. (6) The Son of God, 
personal, eternal, consubstantial with the Father ; the catholic doctrine. 



62 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



Chapter IV. 

PA G AN ISM DE THR ON ED. 

284-325. 

The empire was a house divided against itself, and exposed 
to the pillage of the Germanic tribes. The senate was losing 
its power. The army created emperors with a shout, and a 
traitor's sword removed them. In 284 the freedman, Diocle- 
tian, was elected by the soldiers. He had most of the pagan 
virtues. He had no culture or philosophy to fill him with zeal 
for the heathen gods. If he had not been pressed by vicious 
associates he might never have left his name upon a persecution 
which was intended to strike the Church out of existence. He 
gradually framed a new polity.* He and the savage Galerius, 
to whom he gave his daughter Valeria, ruled the East. Their 
new capital was Nicomedia. The barbarous Maximian ruled 
the West, along with Constantius Chlorus, one of the most 
humane of his generals, and the only one of the four rulers 
who had in his veins the blood of the Roman nobility. Their 
headquarters were at Milan. 

Galerius is the man who comes to the front in our history. 
His mother had reared her shepherd-boy in the rank heathen- 
ism of an Illyrian village. At the court of Diocletian she was 
vexed to find Christians, his wife and daughter being counted 
among them. The church on the hill at Nicomedia was her 
abhorrence. She was provoked because her own altar did not 
draw a crowd. She was sorry that Hierocles, the new Celsus, 
could not report a general decline of Christianity. The philos- 
ophers and priests were not hopeful of their cause. Their 
rallying cries did not fill the temples. Paganism was dying. 

There was a reason. The Church, during the long rest 
from violence, was growing morally stronger than the empire. 



* Diocletian and Maximian were the Augusti ; Galerius and Constantius, 
the Ccesars. 



DECLINE OF SPIRITUALITY. 63 

We have no census of her members ; but it would not tell her 
entire strength, for she had entered thousands of non-professors 
on her list of friends. Gibbon thought that the Christians in 
the empire, shortly before 311, did not amount to "more than 
a twentieth part" of the population; other writers put them at 
a twelfth, tenth, or even a fifth. In the East they may have 
formed "the majority of the middle classes of Greek society." 
Their next strongest hold was in North Africa and Southern 
Europe. In Rome there were about forty Churches, with per- 
haps fifty or sixty thousand adherents, reckoned as a twentieth 
of the inhabitants. There were other cities more Christian. 
If one-twelfth of the people attended the Churches, there was 
hardly another twelfth willing to slay them. The day for mobs 
to assault them voluntarily was nearly past. Magistrates must 
be ordered to arrest them ; for their religion was legalized. 
Their congregations, or communities, might assume to act as 
little republics if they were assailed.* Diocletian may have 
feared these self-governed corporations more than Trajan feared 
the guilds. For the members no longer met in secret. They 
walked abroad in no disguise. They were respectable and 
respected. They were found in all ranks of life. They wor- 
shiped in the broad light of day. They had built numberless 
houses of worship, many of them as splendid as the heathen 
temples, and crowded every Sabbath. 

But in the success of the Church was its source of spiritual 
danger. A worldly spirit was tempting it. Presbyters had 
grown into prelates, and these high bishops were not all free 
from the love of wealth and power. Idle ceremonies and false 
ideas had been thrown about the sacraments, f such as the sign 
of the cross and exorcism in baptism ; the notion that it 
secured the remission of sins ; and that certain sins committed 
after baptism were unpardonable, and hence a delay of the rite ; 
a desire to receive baptism in some heroic mode ; various forms 
in the administration of the Lord's Supper, and infants per- 
mitted to receive it, for it was considered to be essential to sal- 



*" There was not a town, hardly a village, in the empire — nay, what was, 
indeed, far more serious, there was not a legion — in which these organizations 
did not exist." (Draper.) This could hardly be the fact in the remoter prov- 
inces, or we should have more certain evidences of a strong Church among the 
Romans in Britain, and of the Britons while under their sway. 
tNote III. 



64 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

vation. There was too much fondness for the relics of mar- 
tyrs, and too high praise of celibacy, fasting, and monastic life. 
Yet we may easily find examples of true devotion, piety, and 
beneficence. The Church took care of her poor. To their 
support many a rich convert gave large wealth. Some pastors 
imitated Origen in circulating copies of the Bible, as did Pam- 
philus, of Csesarea, whose large library was famous. The pen 
was the press of the time. Valens, a gray-haired deacon of 
Jerusalem, is said to have been a living concordance of Scrip- 
ture. Was it too much to hope that Diocletian might be con- 
verted ? He loved the fine arts ; he collected books. His 
librarian, Lucian, was thus advised by the good Theonas, of 
Alexandria, "Let no day pass without reading a portion of 
Holy Writ. Nothing else so nourishes the heart and enriches 
the mind. Be careful not to show a contempt for the pagan 
literature, in which the emperor takes delight. Praise whatever 
you find good in it. Only let drop a word, occasionally, in 
praise of the Holy Scriptures. He may mention Christ, or 
give you oppportunity to speak of him ; then show that he is 
the Son of God." 

This success of the Church Avas an offense to the pagan 
party. Something must be done. It wanted a leader, and 
found him in Galerius. He began about 292, by ordering his 
generals to force Christians into the army, and compelling them 
to adore the image of the emperor, and acknowledge the sacri- 
fice to the gods ; the one act was blasphemy, the other idolatry. 
A young Numidian sublimely refused, and was slain. At Tan- 
giers, when the legion was honoring Caesar in pagan fashion, 
the centurion, Marcellus, rose from the camp-table, flung down 
the belt, vine-branch, and sword; saying, "From this moment 
I cease to serve as a soldier ; I despise the worship of your 
gods." He was executed.* These were signs of the storm, 
but the Churches were not yet assailed. 

The breath of Galerius ate like rust upon the finer qualities 
of the emperor. Hierocles and the priests grew bolder. They 
managed Apollo, whose voice was heard from the depths of a 
cave, saying, "that his oracles had failed of late because of the 



*The story of the Theban Legion, slaughtered at St. Maurice, in Switzer- 
land, dates about 296-300. The legend may be the outgrowth of a fact which 
showed that the Caesar could not employ the army in the work of persecution. 



DIRE PERSECUTION. 6$ 

just on earth." They could interpret the riddle, for they had 
contrived it. Apollo spoke in irony ; he meant by the just 
the Christians who made a religion of righteousness. Thus 
these men worked upon the imperial mind. They were glad to 
hear Diocletian say, "No new religion is to censure the old. 
It is a crime to overthrow what our ancestors have settled, and 
which is the law of the state." By degrees he yielded. In 
the year 303, at a council in the palace, at Nicomedia, a plot 
was formed. Early on a February morning, the day of a 
heathen festival, the fine church on the hill was assaulted by of- 
ficers, who broke down the doors, pillaged it, and sought in vain 
for an image of Christ. They burnt copies of the Bible, and 
with ax and grappling-hook leveled the building to the ground. 

The next morning the people found posted on the public 
square an edict requiring similar acts every-where. A man, 
whom the Greek Church canonizes as John, tore it down, and 
fastened up the sarcastic words, "Victories of the emperors 
over the Goths and Sarmatians !"* He avowed his glorious 
crime, and died like a hero in the fire, a martyr to something 
better than his rashness. The palace was twice fired, and in 
vain did Galerius accuse the Christians, for this new Nero was 
suspected of kindling the flames in order to rouse still higher 
the wrath of Diocletian. Thus the work of blood and flame 
was begun. It was to go on for eight years. Edict after 
edict went into all the provinces. The Christians at the court 
were forced to recant, be banished, or die ; but poor Lactantius 
escaped to tell the story in his "Death of Persecutors," and to 
write his "Institutes of Religion." 

Eusebius, of Csesarea, saw Palestine a land of mourning, 
and honored many a noble martyr in his History. Generals, 
who ought to have been driving back the Goths, were slaugh- 
tering the best men in their own legions. Magistrates were 
growing rich upon confiscated property, while their hirelings 
were torturing and killing their most honest and industrious 
neighbors. The mobs, acting under orders, were pulling down 
churches with yells of delight. Troops of Christian men were 
driven to the mines, where labor was made as painful as in the 
galleys of Huguenot times. Racks and wheels were in de- 
mand. In Africa it seemed as if the lions and leopards were 

♦Enemies whom the emperors ought to have been resisting. 

5 



66 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, 

surfeited with the blood of saints. Women sometimes took 
their own lives rather than be outraged by brutal officers. 
Bishops and presbyters were crowded into prisons along with 
thieves and murderers ; or, if the dungeons were too full, the 
vilest criminals were set free, and the clergy burnt in order to 
make room for delicate women and sensitive maidens, who were 
reserved for infamies untold. Thus went on the work, in 
woeful monotony, from the Rhine to the Euphrates. 

But the masterpiece of heathen policy was the order to 
seek and burn all copies of the Word of God. Hitherto the 
enemy had been lopping off the branches of the tree whose 
leaves were for the healing of the nations ; now the blow was 
aimed at the root. It had once been the policy of Antiochus 
Epiphanes, when he madly sought to destroy the Jewish Scrip- 
tures. It was both wise and wicked. It had but one defect, 
it could not be carried into complete execution. The sacred 
treasure was in too many hands, and too many of its guardians 
were brave and prudent, to make extermination possible. An 
African bishop said, "Here is my body, take it, burn it; but I 
will not deliver up the Word of God." A deacon said, 
' ' Never, sir, never ! Had I children I would sooner deliver 
them to you than the Divine Word." He and his wife were 
burnt together. Some gave up heretical books, and the easy 
magistrates were satisfied. Many kindly governors were con- 
tent to receive any writings which would appease the law.* 
The writings of Hierocles and his friend Porphyry have per- 
ished by simple neglect, while the Book against which they 
wrote and raged is read in millions of homes. "There is a 
Providence." The Christians, who delivered up copies of the 
Bible were afterwards branded as apostates, and called Tradi- 
tores. Questions about them gave rise to the Donatists, who 
claimed to be the true lineage of the faithful, f 



®At Cirta, in Numidia, the Christians saw their church pulled down, and 
they met for worship in a private house, rejoicing that the Bible was left them. 
The readers had taken it away. On demand they surrendered the saci*ed ves- 
sels, a curious inventory, showing their wealth, and, perhaps, their fashion ; 
, '.'two chalices of gold and six of silver, six silver flagons, one little caldron, 
seven golden lamps, two large candlesticks, seven small candlesticks of copper, 
eleven copper lamps, with chains," besides numerous garments for the poor. 
Five copies of their Bible were sought out and burnt. 

tNote I. 



THE SUDDEN CHANGE— CONSTANTINE. 6 1 / 

This should be called the Galerian Persecution. In its 
second year Diocletian, sick, perhaps deranged in mind, abdi- 
cated the throne, retired to his villa at Salona, boasted of his 
fine garden, and left Galerius the master of the East. This 
madman seemed both to rule and ruin. The state suffered 
with the Church. So impoverished were the people that it was 
said that none remained to be taxed but the beggars. The 
trials of the Christians were almost lost in the general woes of 
mankind. The tyrant boasted that the very name of the 
Christians was abolished, and yet he was compelled to admit his 
total failure, and entreat them to pray for him. They were 
ready to do it, when they saw him dying of a loathsome dis- 
ease, and heard the wail of his remorse. He would issue an 
edict declaring Christianity a lawful religion. To it must be 
subscribed one name, whose sound might startle him — Con- 
stantine ! Did he not remember that, while he was using every 
available power to crush the Church, he had let slip the pris- 
oner who might secure her deliverance ? 

Constantine, the son of Constantius Chlorus and Helena, 
the daughter of an innkeeper, was born at Naissa, in Dacia, 
about 272. When his father became ruler over Gaul, Spain, 
and Britain, he must marry the daughter of Maximian, be di- 
vorced from Helena, and leave his son as a hostage at Nico- 
media. Constantine was there educated. He distinguished 
himself as a soldier until withdrawn from the field by the ty- 
rant who dared not trust him with liberty. Galerius had seen 
how Constantius, the co-emperor, had almost ignored the cruel 
edicts, and they were almost a nullity in Britain, Gaul, and 
Spain.* He had treated the son of that Caesar as a prisoner 
rather than as a hostage, and had exposed his mother to 
violence on account of her favor to Christianity, if not her faith 
in Christ. He could not forget how Constantine had escaped 
by night, taken the best roads, used the relays of horses, 
hamstrung those he left at the stations, and speeding across 
Europe had joined his father on the English Channel, fought 
the Picts in Britain, buried Constantius at York, and there been 
proclaimed emperor of the West by the army. From that 

* « ' Constantius permitted churches to be pulled down lest he should appear to 
dissent from the edicts, but he preserved unhurt the true temple of God, which 
is the human body." (Lactantius.) 



68 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

time, in 306, Constantine had been gaining power, and working 
his way southward, as the conqueror of rivals who claimed to 
be emperors. About his headquarters at Treves, he was gath- 
ering a force of ninety-eight thousand soldiers, and preparing 
to march and deliver Rome from the usurper, Maxentius, a 
young wretch who was scourging the Church, while a Christian 
Lucretia plunged the dagger into her own heart to escape his 
brutality. It was time for tyrants to think of other work than 
that of destroying the most loyal men in the empire simply be- 
cause they had learned their obedience in the school of Christ, 
for Constantine was coming. He was the man whose name 
went upon the edict of liberty in 311, along with those of 
Galerius and Licinius. 

A few more years, with their victories and local persecutions, 
and a Christian emperor would sit upon that throne, which for 
nearly three centuries had held the Church under the ban. 
There were no less than six self-styled Caesars in the field. 
Maximin asserted himself as the ruler of Asia, and the cham- 
pion of paganism. A scheme was devised to revive, reform, 
and dignify the old heathen worship. Priests of decent char- 
acter were appointed as the bishops of heathenism. The gods 
were adorned with new attributes borrowed from Christianity. 
The aim was to construct a pagan Church. A fraud, entitled 
the "Acts of Pilate," and filled with blasphemies against Christ, 
was taught in the schools and widely circulated in Asia Minor. 
The vilest women were employed to assert that Christians were 
partakers in their sins. But the Lord called forth the virtues 
of his people. The rains ceased. Famine came, then pesti- 
lence. Again, the Christians seemed to forget their woes. 
They risked their lives in ministering to the sick, the starving, 
the forsaken, the dying, and in burying the neglected dead. 
Thus with heroism and charity they took their kind revenge 
upon their persecutors. The pagan Church was a failure. 
Even Maximin would yet relent under the terrors of the 
Almighty, and assert that nearly all Syrians had become Chris- 
tians, against whom it was useless to employ craft, slander, 
sword, and fire. 

Constantine led his army into Italy. He afterwards said 
(if we credit Eusebius) that he had a dream, and in a vision he 
saw the Christian cross, and on it the words, ' ' By this con- 



THE PROVIDENTIAL MAN. 69 

quer." He may have had a dream on the eve of a great battle, 
which he thought might decide the conflict between Christian- 
ity and paganism, and afterwards magnified it into a miracle. 
About that time he devised or adopted the Labarum as the 
military standard. It was adorned with a cross, a crown, and 
a monogram of the name of Christ. He won the great battle 
at the Milvian Bridge (312), near Rome, saw Maxentius go 
down in the Tiber, and entered the capital in triumph. Forth- 
with was issued an edict of toleration to all religions ; property 
taken from the Christians must be restored. 

The jealous Licinius, who attempted to rally the pagans, 
and began a persecution, was utterly defeated at Adrianople ; 
and Constantine, in the year 324, was sole ruler of the empire. 
Thenceforth he aimed to establish Christianity as the triumphant 
faith in the Roman world. The revolution is without a parallel. 
Its suddenness proves that the Church had won a moral posi- 
tion from which she could not be driven. She had not put 
forward any military leader, nor raised an army, nor thought 
of victories by war. Constantine had voluntarily taken her 
cause in hand, when he might have used the cross as a mere 
staff in clambering up to power. He may have foreseen the im- 
possibility of repressing Christianity and the certain decay of 
paganism, and resolved to take the winning side. If his father 
or mother was a Christian, filial regard may have prompted 
him to avow the true faith. 

We take Constantine as we find him — not a perfect, but the 
providential, man for the crisis. His motives and character 
are still before the bar of history. It is easy to point out seri- 
ous defects, if not crimes. He held the office of Pontifex 
Maximus — high-priest of paganism — all his life, and yet assumed 
to be a father to the Church. He took part in heathen cere- 
monies. He put to death some of his relatives, his repudiated 
wife, Fausta, and his son, Crispus, among them, on charges 
of treason. He was not a member of the Church until he 
came to die. Nevertheless, his coins and statues represented 
him holding the cross or in prayer. He studied the Holy 
Scriptures. He was a constant attendant upon the Church 
services. He composed and delivered religious addresses. 
Eusebius reports one of his sermons. He chose bishops as his 
associates. On his journeys he carried a movable chapel. In 



JO HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

nothing else did he manifest so much interest as in the peace 
and progress of the Christian Church. In these he saw the 
prosperity and grandeur of the empire. The Christians were 
not in the majority. If they were only about one-twentieth of 
the whole population, he had a singular fondness for the mi- 
nority. His own tolerant example must have been followed by 
large numbers of pagans. "The first Christian emperor, the 
first defender of the faith," was a man "not to be imitated or 
admired, but much to be remembered and deeply to be studied." 
Many evils came with his patronage of the Church and her own 
sudden elevation. Bishops assumed too high powers, and mem- 
bers grew too secular in their spirit. Pagan rites may have 
intruded into Christian ordinances. But the blame of all this 
does not rest upon him alone. The good results of his brilliant 
reign are not to be ignored. The Greek Church honors him 
as "the equal of the apostles." The western world, more 
wisely, has named him "the Great," and still cherishes a "just 
and grateful remembrance of his services to the cause of Chris- 
tianity and civilization." 

The edicts of Constantine from 312 to 325 show an ecclesi- 
astical spirit. They refer largely to the building and repair of 
churches, and liberal gifts to them ; the restoration of property 
to Christians, who must be equally just to the pagans ; mutual 
toleration of religions ; the settlement of religious disputes ; the 
calling of local councils ; * the exemption of the clergy from 
civil offices and taxes ; the burning of Tews who should assail 
Christians ; the emancipation of slaves ; the general observance 
of Sunday (solis dies) ; restoration of property to the heirs of 
martyrs ; careful provision for the poor ; the release of Chris- 
tians from the mines ; the forbidding of images — even his own 
statue must not be set up in the temples ; severe penalties upon 
heathen diviners and priests who should perform sacrifices in 
private houses, and practice magic ; and the earnest advice that 
all his subjects adopt Christianity. He first sought to reform 
all abuses, rather than repress paganism or heresies. The 
priests must keep good order in their heathen worship. He 
' ' respected the temples in general ; but he shut up and un- 
roofed some which were almost deserted, turned others into 



* Note I. . 



CHANGE OF THE CAPITAL. J I 

churches, and destroyed those which had been the scenes of 
immoral rites or of pretended miracles." 

The change of the capital marks a triumph. Rome was the 
great city of paganism, the residence of stubborn senators, the 
home of a proud aristocracy, the center of old ideas and poli- 
ties. Diocletian had forsaken it. Constantine had no love for 
it, especially after the executions of his wife and son, when the 
public abhorrence was shot upon his palace gate in a placard 
which compared him to Nero. To massacre the insulting peo- 
ple was a less revenge than to degrade their city by taking 
away the throne. The Christian reverence for Rome, as seen 
in Charlemagne, had not yet been acquired. Nor did Constan- 
tine wish to reside at Nicomedia, the recent seat of intolerance. 
He may have been moved both by wrath and by wisdom. The 
Roman senate and nobility were unconverted. Their advice was 
not wanted by one who would centralize the government in 
himself. With a new emperor, a new policy, a new code, a 
new religion, there must be a new metropolis, a new and Chris- 
tian Rome. At the old Byzantium, one of the grandest sites 
for commerce and power, rose Constantinople, destined to be 
the capital of the eastern part of the empire for more than 
eleven hundred years, and a notable center of history to our 
own times. Her chief dates indicate epochs and great changes 
in civilization. Her rise brought the East and the West into 
rivalry, and contributed to the final division of the empire and 
the schism of the Greek and Latin Churches. But the first 
stage of the rivalry shows a strife, not merely of cities, but of 
religious systems. ' ' In the Old Rome paganism died out 
very slowly ; the New Rome was a Christian city from the 
beginning." Within the new walls were no temples nor altars 
to the gods. In every quarter churches were built and crosses 
raised. The palace was decorated with Christian art. The 
gladiatorial shows were forbidden for many years. The very 
statues of the gods looked as if they had been conquered and 
placed on the streets as trophies of victory over their religion. 

Thus Christianity had a throne, a city, a capital ; the free- 
dom of an empire, the patronage of an emperor. Beneath all 
that was external there was a moral strength in the Church. 
How had she gained it? By the three ministries with which 
she began. But the spiritual operation of these ministries was 



72 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

already affected by certain developments of doctrine, polity, 
and secularity: that of Christ, by the controversies which had 
begun concerning his person, so that his nature, rather than his 
gracious working, became the absorbing theme; that of the 
Spirit, by attributing a saving virtue to sacraments and rites, as 
if his renewing work depended on them ; that of men, by 
theories which unduly elevated their office, changing the 
preacher into a ritualistic priest, and the pastor into an ambi- 
tious prelate. 

We shall not assert that, in themselves, the long persecu- 
tions were a benefit and the imperial favors were an injury to 
the Church. Under the one she lacked privilege, under the 
other grace to improve it. We shall find that ' ' Christianity 
did not avert the ruin of the empire, because, when pure, it 
had but little influence outside its esoteric believers, while so- 
ciety was rotten to the core, and was rapidly approaching a 
natural dissolution. When it was dominant it failed, because it 
was itself corrupted, and the ruin had begun. . . . When 
it became the religion of the court and of the fashionable 
classes, it was used to support the very evils against which it 
originally protested, and which it was designed to remove." 



NOTES. 

I. The Donatists. In 31 1 Cecilian was elected Bishop of Carthage. 
Charges were made that he had been unkind to persecuted Christians, and 
that Felix, who assisted in ordaining him was a traditor. Seventy bishops, or 
pastors, formed an opposing party, and elected Majorinus as their bishop. 
Both parties appealed to Constantine. He summoned a council at Rome, 
and another at Aries, in 314, and they decided in favor of Cecilian. Do- 
natus, an African bishop (there were two of that name), and his party adhered 
to Majorinus; hence the Donatist schism. They were not heretics, and, 
like the Novatians, they claimed to be the true, pure, heroic Church. They 
excommunicated all others. They rebaptized all proselytes, and reordained 
all preachers coming from the Catholic side. With all their boasting, some 
of their leaders are accused of having been traditors. In 330 they had 
nearly four hundred bishops, and were the strong party in North Africa. 
Many of their principles were right, and among them were many excellent 
men. But they were disgraced by the Circumcettiones , the nominal converts 
from the Punic peasants, who begged around the cells or hovels of the poor 
people, and grew more and more immoral, until they became the burglars 
and brigands of the country. 



NOTES TO CHAPTER IV. 73 

II. The Meletians were led into schism by Meletius, a bishop in Egypt, 
deposed on a charge of having lapsed under persecution. He ordained 
bishops, or pastors, of whom there were thirty in the sect in 325. They 
aided Arius in hfe heresy. In 361 another Meletius, at Antioch, proved too 
orthodox for the Arians, and gave his name to a local schism. 

III. Rites and Usages. Irenaeus speaks of baptism as "a power of re- 
generation unto God," and says, "Christ came to save all who are through 
him regenerated unto God, — infants and little ones, etc." Tertullian opposed 
infant baptism. Origen wrote, "The Church had from the apostles the tra- 
dition [injunction] to give baptism to young children." "According to the 
usage of the Church it (baptism) is likewise given to little children." So 
Basil, Ambrose, Jerome, Chrysostom, Augustine, Pelagius, several councils, 
and other witnesses. 

The sign of the cross, used about 150 as a seal to baptism, came to be 
one of the earliest superstitions. To it was ascribed a magical, talismanic 
power. It was made when performing common acts, such as putting on a 
coat or lighting a lamp. It became a public rite connected with all religious 
services. Infant communion in 240. The clergy assumed a distinctive 
dress in 300; the Council of Elvira, in 305, forbade images in churches, 
enjoined Sabbatic fasts, made rules for keeping vigils and festivals. — Altars 
in churches. — Friday a religious day. — Christian emblems, as the fish, dove, 
anchor, cup, wheat-shlaf. — Tendencies to a secret discipline {discipline/, 
arcani), by which the higher doctrines and the sacraments were regarded as 
mysteries to be kept from unbelievers, and made known only to the initiated ; 
this arose from persecution, the fear of betrayal, and sacred reverence. — 
Family worship from apostolic times. — Responses given by the people in the 
Church services. — The public Reader of the Scriptures was an officer in the 
Church. — Deaconesses ordained until the fifth century. — Deacons became 
an order of clergy. — Preachers often applauded in Church by shouts and 
clapping of hands. — Many sermons of the Fathers were written, not by 
themselves, but by stenographers. 



Period II 



FROM THE COUNCIL OF NICE TO THAT OF CHALCEDON. 
». ®. 325-^51. 

THE EMPIRE BECOMES NOMINALLY CHRISTIAN, AND DESTROYS PAGANISM — THE 
CHURCH FORMULATES HER CREED IN COUNCILS, AND DEFENDS IT AGAINST 

HERESIES — THEOLOGIANS FREELY DEVELOP THEOLOGY IN CONTROVERSIES 

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE CHURCH SETTLED, AND HER THOUGHT TURNED 
TO ANTHROPOLOGY — PRELACY ADVANCED TO THE PATRIARCHAL SYSTEM. 



Chapter V. 

THE NICENE AGE. 

325-380. 

I. The Rise of Arianism. 

Alexander, the gentle Bishop of Alexandria, kept an eye 
upon the various theories of men who claimed to be the ad- 
vanced thinkers of the day. There were plenty of them around 
him. He preached to his presbyters on the Trinity, strongly 
insisting that the Son was the equal of the Father in eminence 
and in essence. He asserted, or implied, the eternal generation 
of the Son. A simple sermon threw the World into agitation, 
for Arius heard him. 

Arius, probably a Libyan, had become a deacon, joined 
Meletius in his schism, and been excommunicated. Bishop 
Peter had forgiven him, ordained him a presbyter, and in 313 
assigned him one of the nine churches in Alexandria. He is 
described as tall, austere, learned, eloquent, fascinating, but 
proud, artful, restless, and fond of disputes. He accused 
Alexander of tending to Sabellianism in asserting that the 

74 



EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA. 75 

Father and the Son were of the same essence and eternity.* 
But he did not arraign the bishop for heresy. He began his 
own error by perverting the words "Son" and "begotten" to 
a literal sense. He would not admit the phrase, ' ' the eternal 
generation of the Son." He argued that "if the Father begat 
the Son, the Son had a beginning of existence;" hence there 
was a time when "the Son was not." That time was before 
all worlds, and the Son was the Creator of them all, but yet he 
was a creation of God. He was made from "what once was 
not," or from nothing, and yet is to be worshiped as the first- 
born son of God. In this doctrine was involved an error, held 
for a time by Lucian, of Antioch, that Jesus had not a human 
spirit, f the Logos taking its place. In this view he had not a 
complete human nature. 

Arius was zealous. The officers of his Church, the mer- 
chants, and the elegant ladies spread his doctrines. A strong 
party gathered about him. Conferences were held with him in 
vain. Alexander warned the clergy against the heresy. At 
length, in 321, a council of one hundred bishops deposed him, 
and excommunicated him and nine of his supporters. He 
went to Palestine. His artful letters brought him the sympathy 
of many eminent bishops. Eusebius of Caesarea advised him 
to be moderate. Those who had followed Lucian in his errors 
but not in his recantation, encouraged him to push his cause. 
At Nicomedia he found a foremost helper in his "fellow-Lu- 
cianist, " Eusebius, a bishop who had the talents which win 
influence at courts. He had learning and knew how to make 
it appear large. He was eloquent, ambitious, and his "con- 
science never stood in the way of preferment. He was one 
whom no man cared to offend ; and they who did were sure, 
sooner or later, to rue his anger. He never forgot, and he 
never forgave." He became the leader of the party. 



* We should remember that the definite ideas now attached by Trinitarians 
to the words essence and person, K ousia, substantia and hypostasis, were not then 
clearly apprehended. They were part of the results of a long controversy. A 
council had rejected the term homoousios, as indicating Sabellianism. 

fThis was afterwards the specific heresy of Apollinaris (whom see). Arius 
did not assert it distinctly, being engaged mainly with the Son's relation to the 
Father, and not to man. The Greeks held that in the nature of man were 
three elements, a body {soma), a soul ('psyche), and a spirit (pneuvia). The Latins 
attribute only a body and a soul to man. 



y6 history of the christian church. 

The success of Arius was startling. He seemed to be car- 
rying nearly the whole of Egypt and Asia Minor. The infant 
heresy sprang at once into a giant. He sent out his book 
of songs for travelers, soldiers, sailors, and millers. The the- 
aters began to ridicule theology. In markets, bakeries, and 
shoe-shops were disputes upon the most profound themes. 
One tried to show how Christ was the same in substance 
(homoousios) with the Father: another said the he was sim- 
ply like the Father (homoiousios). A satirist might say that 
the words differed only in an iota. But "the difference be- 
tween homooiision and Jiomoionsion convulsed the world, for 
the simple reason that, in that difference lay the whole question 
of the real truth or falsehood of our Lord's actual divinity." 
Arianism struck at the very heart of that faith which the 
Church had maintained from her infancy. It would take away 
the source of her life. "It could not but divide families, 
cities, nations, continents," and enter into political history. 

Constantine had just united the empire. He was grieved to 
see the Church divided. He assumed that his mission was to 
bring unity into the world. In his first effort to calm the 
storm he wrote a letter to Alexander and Arius. He ignored 
the real point at issue. It was, he thought, a mere question 
of words and nice distinctions. ' ' Restore to me my quiet days 
and calm nights. Give me joy instead of tears. How can I 
have a peaceful mind so long as the people of God, whose 
fellow-servant I am, are thus divided by an unreasonable and 
pernicious spirit of contention?" But this plea was in vain. 

II. The Council of Nice. 

Constantine then summoned the famous Council of Nice, 
not far east of the new capital. Never before had a council 
aimed to be oecumenical, imperial, a representative of the whole 
empire. He planned every thing in grand style. The public 
postal arrangements, the carriages and relays of horses, were at 
the service of the bishops, and they might draw on the imperial 
treasury for all expenses. Some preferred to walk all the way. 
In June, 325, the town was crowded with strangers, and among 
them were the members of the council, probably, three hun- 
dred and eighteen. Very few of them were from the West. 
Some of them wished the emperor to settle their private dis- 



THREE PARTIES— NICENE CREED. 



77 



putes. He burnt their papers, and advised them to be good 
brothers. 

There were three parties represented: i. The Arian, in 
which were Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nice. Arius 
himself did not come forward prominently. 2. The orthodox, 
in which were Eustathius of Antioch and Hosius of Cordova, 
in Spain, the right-hand man of the emperor; Alexander of 
Alexandria, and his young deacon, Athanasius, theological 
genius of the council, who had no vote in it, but a mighty 
voice afterwards in defense of its creed. 3. The middle party, 
which claimed the emperor, and Eusebius of Caesarea, "the 
father of Church history." * They met in a hall of the palace. 
The emperor entered in his robe of purple, attended by a few 
unarmed Christians. The assembly rose ; he blushed, walked 
modestly up the aisle, and stood before the little throne until 
the bishops gave him the sign to be seated. He seemed as 
the heavenly messenger of God to such men as those genuine 
Copts, the monk-bishops, Potammon, and Paphnutius, who had 
come up from the deserts of the Nile, one-eyed and hamstrung, 
their every look and limp reminding their brethren of the late 
persecutions. There were others who "came like a regiment 
out of some frightful siege or battle, decimated, and mutilated 
by the tortures or the hardships they had undergone." One 
man came from a people whom Galerius could not persecute ; 
he was Theophilus, Bishop of the Goths. 

Eighteen Arians presented their creed. It was caught and 
torn into shreds. The cause of Arius was given up on the 
spot. Eusebius of Csesarea presented one of many creeds then 
in use by the Churches. He says that he had learned it when 
a catechumen, avowed it at baptism, and taught it as a pres- 
byter and a bishop. But as it was silent on the point in ques- 
tion, it was not sufficient. It, or a similar form, was grafted 
with the desired term (Jwmooiisios) and other words deemed im- 
portant. The new form was : 

' ' We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of 
all things visible and invisible : And in one Lord Jesus 
Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only 
begotten, that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God, 
and Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not 

* Chapter VI, Note IV. 



78 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

made, being of one substance (homoonsion) with the Father; 
by whom all things were made in heaven and on earth; who 
for us men, and for our salvation, came down and was incar- 
nate and was made man ; he suffered, and the third day he 
rose again, ascended into heaven ; from thence he cometh to 
judge the quick and the dead: And in the Holy Ghost." 

After much discussion,* this creed was adopted "with loud 
acclamation," and with this disciplinary addition: "And those 
who say there was a time when He was not, and . . . He 
was made out of nothing, or out of another substance ; or, 
the Son of God is created, or changeable, or alterable ; they 
are condemned (anathematized) by the holy catholic and apos- 
tolic Church." 

The books of Arius were burnt. He was banished ; so 
were two Egyptian bishops, with Eusebius of Nicomedia and 
Theognis of Nice. The last two soon subscribed to the creed, 
with explanations, and were recalled. The other members of 
"the great and holy synod" Constantine gave a farewell feast. f 
He was happy in the result. To him the creed may have af- 
firmed an advance in doctrine ; but it contained nothing really 
new to its framers.J Councils have usually been cautious 
about affirming new theology. No doubt the majority thought 
the creed was a decisive victory for their time. But the deci- 



*The letter of Eusebius (in Socrates' Hist., I. 8) shows the difficulty in 
reaching "the philosophical view" of the word homooitsios. When explained by 
the emperor and others to mean "not a part of the Father," "not a part of his 
substance," the Csesarean bishop assented to it, and also "unhesitatingly acqui- 
esced in the anathema." Yet his name was given to the later and large body 
of Eusebians, or Semi-Arians, who took probably from him the phrase, "The 
Son is in every respect like the Father," and thus interpreted their term 
homoiotisios. What is now usually called the Nicene Creed is really the revised 
form of it put forth in 381 by the council at Constantinople. 

tThe council passed twenty canons of discipline, sought to heal schisms, 
and purify the Church. Easter had become the great day of the year ; but 
many of the Greek Churches kept it on the Jewish Passover (the 14th of Nisan), 
which fell on the seven days of the week in succession ; the Latins, on the first 
Sunday after the Passover day, so that it always came on Sunday. The council 
enjoined the Latin custom. When it was proposed to require the married 
clergy to live in celibacy, the one-eyed monk, Paphnutius, in an outburst of 
eloquent rebuke, declared the motion to be contrary to Scripture, and defeated 
it. Prelacy was sanctioned. See Note II. 

% " The Nicene divines interpreted, in a new language, the belief of their 
first fathers in the faith. . . . They did not vote a new honor to Jesus Christ 
which he had not before possessed." (Liddon, Bampton Lectures.) 



ATHANASIUS. Jg 

sive battles of history have not always closed the war. After 
Marathon came Xerxes to rave and be defeated. After Nice 
were the bitterest conflicts. The confession must be defended 
against a host. Its champion was Athanasius, about whose 
name the Nicene age revolves. 

III. Athanasius. 

The story is that, on a martyr's day in 313, little Athana- 
sius was playing bishop on the sea-shore at Alexandria, and 
baptizing a troop of boys. Alexander saw him, kindly talked 
with him, and won his heart. He caught a glimpse of his 
genius, obtained leave of his Christian parents, took him into 
his own house, and educated him. The student cared less than 
Clement for philosophy, and more for the plain historical sense 
of Scripture than Origen. If he thought of becoming a hermit 
with the aged Anthony, the Arian controversy drew him from 
the deserts. He went as a deacon to Nice ; he returned to be 
surprised, the next year, when he was nominated as the suc- 
cessor of Alexander. It was useless to plead that he was too 
young (about thirty), and in vain did he hide himself. The 
clergy and people shouted: "Give us Athanasius, the Chris- 
tian, the ascetic, the true bishop! We will have none other." 
In those days a layman might be elected at once to this office, 
and the people had a voice in the election. 

We know less of Athanasius as a bishop than as "the fa- 
ther of orthodoxy " and an exile from his Church. Through 
forty-six years (326-373) he was so persistent in his cause, and 
so pursued by his foes, that it came to be a proverb, "Atha- 
nasius against the world, and the world against Athanasius." 
Arian councils made it the order of the day to depose him. 
Emperors made it their business to banish or befriend him. 
Five times was he in exile. Now he is far away at Treves, in 
Gaul, writing and preaching, and giving hints to men who wish 
to be monks ; again he is up the Nile among the hermits, 
whose firm belief in his theology is their best virtue. Once a 
lady conceals him in her house at midnight from an Arian 
mob, and for days supplies him with books ; at another time 
he hides for four months in his father's tomb. 

He was a little man, rather a dwarf, crooked, lean, hardy, 



8o HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

with a fair face, keen eye, and a marvelous power over all who 
met him. His ready wit, boldness, mysterious way of appear- 
ing just when he was not expected, his foresight of coming 
events, and his strategy in baffling his enemies, led some of 
them to call him a magician and a wizard. With honest 
shrewdness he met the wiles of his adversaries. In his indig- 
nation he often applied hard names to his foes. He was not 
free from the faults of his age. Debaters did not then use 
tender words. He had two maxims : one was, that the state 
must not determine the faith of the Church, or prescribe the 
terms of communion ; the other, that orthodoxy must persuade 
men to believe, and not force them. Hence he would not obey 
the dictation of a monarch, nor persecute men for their opinions. 
Arians and emperors first brought persecutions and war into the 
Church. Constantine, when disobeyed by him, called him "that 
proud, turbulent, obstinate, untamable bishop;" and Julian com- 
plimented him as "the odious Athanasius. " No doubt he and 
his doctrines were odious to an emperor who did his utmost to 
restore paganism. He was not a bigot for mere words and 
formulas,* while uncompromising in the essentials of the Chris- 
tian faith. The best historians of our time do not charge him 
with a harsh dogmatism, narrowness, and a passionate love of 
controversy. Gibbon, whose cold and critical pen was not 
lavish in praise of Churchmen, wrote with unusual admiration : 
"The immortal name of Athanasius will never be separated 
from the catholic doctrine of the Trinity, to whose defense he 
consecrated every moment and every faculty of his being. . . . 
He displayed a superiority of character and abilities which 
would have qualified him far better than the degenerate sons 
of Constantine for the government of a great monarchy." In 
the year of his death one of his brother bishops said, in his 
eulogy: "When I praise Athanasius, virtue itself is my 



* " If ever there was a man who was not the slave of language, who had 
his eye upon ideas, truths, facts, and who made language submissively do their 
work, that man was the great St. Athanasius. He advocated the homoousion at 
Nicsea because he was convinced that it was the sufficient and necessary symbol 
and safeguard of the treasure of truth committed to the Church ; but years 
afterwards he declined to press it upon such of the Semi-Arians as he knew to 
be at least sincerely loyal to the truth which it protected." (Liddon, Bampton 
Lectures, 1866.) 



THE DRIED HAND. ' 8l 

theme. . . . He was the true pillar of the Church. His 
life and conduct were the rule of bishops, and his doctrine the 
rule of the orthodox faith." 

IV. Policy of the Arians. 

The Arians were zealous. They resolved to control the 
Church. Their policy was to gain the emperors and use the sec- 
ular power; to remove the orthodox bishops, and place their 
own men in the cities ; to manage the councils, and to arraign the 
orthodox leaders on whatever charges they could find or invent. ) 
They made the end justify the means. Eusebius of Nicomedia 
was again at court. It was easy for him to work upon the 
mind of Constantia, who could not forget that her brother, the 
emperor, had conquered and put to death her husband, Licin- 
ius. She became a zealous agent of the Arians. They pleaded 
for Arius, who now professed to adopt the essentials of the 
Nicene Creed. Constantine recalled him in 331, and ordered 
Athanasius to restore him to the communion of the Church. 
The emperor assumed to be " bishop of bishops." 

Then came the clash. Athanasius dared to disobey, rode 
post-haste to the capital, visited Constantine, gave his reasons, 
and was sustained. Thus the Arians failed in their first scheme. 
Then they began a series of charges against Athanasius, the 
worst of which was that he had murdered a Meletian bishop 
named Arsenius. They carried about a dried hand in a box, 
showed it to the emperor, and raised a great uproar. Athana- 
sius took measures to discover whether Arsenius was really 
dead, and then kept silent. He let the Arians work up their 
case with all the skill possible. In 335 he went to the Council 
of Tyre. At the outset the majority of sixty bishops treated 
him as a criminal. In proof of the main charge the Arians 
brought forward the dried hand. They declared that it was 
that of Arsenius. A murmur of horror passed through the 
council. 

Athanasius rose. All were silent. When he asked, "Did 
any of you know Arsenius?" many said they had known him 
well. He then brought in a man muffled in a cloak, uncovered 
his face, and said, "Look closely, now, and see if this is the 
man I murdered." The bishops were astonished; those who 
were ignorant of the Arian plot really believed the man was 

6 



82 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

dead ; those who had hired him to conceal himself in a monas- 
tery thought he was far away. Athanasius had found him, 
and now drew forth the hands, saying, in cool sarcasm, "God 
has given this man two hands ; here they are ; let my enemies 
show how he ever had a third." Thus the defendant put his 
accusers on trial and convicted them. In their anger they 
rushed upon him so violently that he feared for his life. Other 
charges were as groundless. He left the council, claiming that 
decisions by one party alone were invalid. Yet he was de- 
posed ! He sailed to Constantinople. Meeting the emperor, 
who tried to ride by in silence, he grasped the bridle-rein and 
demanded, "Either summon a lawful council, or give me an 
opportunity to meet my accusers in your presence." The de- 
posing bishops were to hear the answer. 

Meanwhile, they rode down to Jerusalem to perform a 
nobler service. Helena, the aged mother of Constantine, had 
made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, been baptized in Jordan, 
imagined that she had found the cross of our Lord, built 
churches on sacred sites, and returned to die in the arms of 
her son. Thus she had given an impetus to that series of 
pilgrimages out of which grew legends, superstitions, fraud in 
relics, and the crusades. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher 
was dedicated by the Council of Tyre, arid the Holy Land .was 
thought to be Arianized. 

These bishops were startled by the emperor's summons for 
them to meet in Constantinople. Many of them, in alarm, 
rode home post-haste. The two named Eusebius, and other 
daring leaders, obeyed. They devised a new charge, that 
Athanasius had talked of hindering the shipment of wheat to 
Constantinople. This touched the emperor's interests. He 
probably did not believe the slander ; but he cut short the 
defense, and, to get rid of the case, he banished Athanasius to 
Treves, in Gaul, where his son Constantine, the governor, 
kindly supplied the wants of the exile ; and the bishop of the 
old city proved a warm friend. Christianity was there, but its 
record has not reached us. 

The next sensation was the proposed welcome of Arius 
into the pale of the Church. It was to be done at Constanti- 
nople, whose bishop, Alexander, must admit him, or be de- 
posed. The aged bishop prayed that the Lord would defeat 



CONSTANTIUS— EUSEBIANS. 83 

the scheme. On a Winter day in 337, Arius, at the age of 
eighty years, was paraded on horseback through the streets of 
the capital, by a crowd that talked in high glee of their triumph 
on the morrow. He was seized by pains like those of cholera, 
and suddenly died. Some ascribed it to poison ; some to a 
divine judgment ; others to the excessive joy of Arius in his 
victory. The catholics gave thanks in the churches. It is said 
that many Arians were converted to the Nicene faith. 

"Give us back Athanasius, " was the loud cry from his 
people at Alexandria, and from the monks of Egypt. It was 
repeated by the orthodox bishops and hermits of Syria. It 
echoed from Rome and the West. But Constantine did not 
heed it, except by banishing a few noisy Arians. He wanted 
peace, and did not understand theology. He was dying at the 
age of sixty-five years (337). He was baptized by the courtier 
Eusebius. Gibbon well says: "He still considered the Council 
of Nice as the bulwark of the Christian faith, and the peculiar 
glory of his reign." Despite the protests of Eusebius, he or- 
dered the recall of Athanasius. His will enjoined it on his 
three sons, to whom he divided his empire.* 

Constantius, who became sole emperor in 352, was a tem- 
perate, vain, weak prince, entirely under the control of worth- 
less favorites, crafty women, and craftier bishops. He was 
zealous in suppressing paganism. Temples were pillaged, and 
the spoils given to the Arian Churches, or to his flatterers and 
greedy courtiers. In vain did Hilary and Hosius plead that 
the heathen should not be violently treated, but persuaded to 
renounce their idolatries. Paganism was roused ; its reaction 
would come with Julian. But the zeal of Constantius was kin- 
dled against the Nicenists, when the Eusebians (Semi-Arians) 
took him in hand. This court party, made up of ladies, 
eunuchs, office-seekers, and scheming prelates, resolved them- 
selves into a roving commission to secure edicts, pack synods, 
weary the post-horses, frame creeds and canons, depose bishops. 
and rule the whole Church. These managers turned the con- 
troversy into a political campaign. It was a novel mode of 



-•Constantius ruled the East for fifteen years, and then the whole empire, 
dying, in 361, a fanatical Arian. In the West were the two brothers, Constan- 
tine II, who was slain in 340 by Constans, and he was slain in 350 by one of 
his generals. They were supporters of Athanasius. 



84 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Church government — a half-converted court taking the over- 
sight of all Christendom ! The chief busybody was Constan- 
tius, who had his father's weakness for theologic fame, and dis- 
played it by spending his time in making and unmaking forms 
of faith.* Aiming at unity, this faction produced a diversity 
which was finally ruinous to Arianism. Many creeds made 
more sects. With grim humor Athanasius said that the Euse- 
bians put exact dates to their creeds, so that men might know 
when their faith began and when it ended. 

It would require a volume to set forth the methods and suc- 
cesses of the Arian managers, f The emperor banished ortho- 
dox bishops, and lent his soldiers to install Arian successors. 
Paul was fairly elected at Constantinople, but his opponents 
caused an uproar. It spread from the Church to the streets, 
from the clergy to the crowd, from the disciples to the soldiers. 
War was made, blood was shed, fires were kindled, and the 
mob repulsed the cavalry which Constantius had ordered to 
prevent a riot. He was then at Antioch. Hearing of this 
violence so new in the Church, but often to be repeated, he 
rode through the snows to the capital. The senate knelt for 
mercy. The usual supply of corn was reduced. Paul was 
expelled, but Macedonius was not confirmed as bishop until a 
later time, when the soldiers cut their way into the church 
through a dense crowd, rode over hundreds of dead bodies, 
and secured his installation. J At Antioch the good Eustathius 



*A better employment would have been a more vigorous war against the 
Persians, in the hope of relieving the Christians who appealed to him for defense. 
See Note IV. 

fThe distinction between the Arian and semi- Arian parties is of little 
value, historically, before 358, when we find theological lines sharply drawn. 
(1.) The extreme Arians were Anomceans holding that the Son was unlike 
(anomoios) the Father. They were breaking into many little sects. (2.) The 
semi- Arians held that the Son was like {homoiousios) the Father in all respects in 
which the Scriptures affirm a likeness. Those who honestly searched the Scrip- 
tures were tending*more and more to the Nicene doctrine, but still evading the 
term homoousios, co-essential. Basil, of Ancyra, whom Athanasius thought to be 
essentially sound, held a synod in his city (358) ; it struck into a path towards 
orthodoxy, and won Constantius back to semi- Arianism. He proposed a general 
Council at Nice ; the result was a double Council in 359 ; the eastern part at Se- 
leucia, the western at Rimini (Ariminum), in Italy. They mark stages on the 
road back to orthodoxy. 

JWhen Macedonius was found to be a semi- Arian, he was banished (348), 
at the request of Constans, who had written to his Eastern brother: "Athana- 



A TUMULT. 85 

was falsely charged with a gross crime and removed. At 
Rome there was a violent change, and so almost every-where. 
The floors of many churches were stained with blood. The 
orthodox cried out that the days of Nero and Decius had 
returned. Milman says, ' ' Every-where the Athanasian bishops 
were driven into banishment. The desert was constantly re- 
sounding with the hymns of the pious and venerable exiles as 
they passed along, loaded with chains, to the remote and sav- 
age place of their destination, many of them bearing the 
scars of wounds inflicted upon them by their barbarous persecu- 
tors to enforce their compliance with the Arian doctrines." At 
one time nearly all the more eminent orthodox bishops were in 
exile. Jerome said, the world wondered and groaned to find 
itself Arian. One remarkable man was at his post, Didymus, 
the last great teacher in the Christian school of Alexandria, 
over which Athanasius had appointed him. In it he taught 
nearly sixty years, and died in 395, at a great age. Entirely 
blind from childhood, yet he was eminent for his knowledge 
of literature, mathematics, philosophy, and theology. By 
hearing the Holy Scriptures read in the Church, he had com- 
mitted almost every verse to memory. Jerome was one of his 
pupils for a time. He recorded his thoughts by using engraved 
blocks of wood, and came near discovering the art of printing. 
He held some errors of Origen, but was a thorough Nicenist. 
He sent forth a book against the Macedonian heresy. 

Meanwhile Athanasius had been received at Alexandria 
with lively demonstrations of joy. Magnates and merchants, 
laborers and servants, trains of devout women and troops of 
children met him at the gate with rounds of applause. They 
waved branches of trees, spread carpets in the way, and illu- 
minated their houses. The clergy thought it the happiest day 
of their lives. But he was not long undisturbed. One night, 
when he and his people were keeping the Lenten vigils, a tu- 

sius and Paul are here with me ; reinstate them over their Churches, or I will come 
with an army and do it." They were restored. Paul was again banished, and 
one result was a tumult, in which three hundred persons were slain. He seems 
to have been more steadfast than his friend Hosius, of Cordova, who was forced 
to subscribe an Arian creed, but repented of it before death. Macedonius was 
restored to his chair, and cruelly treated the orthodox. His name was given to 
the Macedonians, who erred concerning the Holy Ghost; some holding thai he 
was not co-essential (Jiomoousios) with the Father; others denying his personality. 



S6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

mult was heard. Five hundred soldiers were at the door. He 
began the Psalm, "O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is 
good." And the people responded, "For his mercy endureth 
forever." With strong voice he continued, "To him that smote 
Egypt in their first-born. — To him that smote great kings. — 
To him who hath redeemed us from our enemies," — and 
the responses grew still louder, "For his mercy endureth for- 
ever." The doors were burst open; the imperial officers 
entered ; arrows flew through the church ; swords flashed in the 
lamplight, and a slaughter began. He escaped, none knew 
how nor whither. The soldiers installed George (Gregory), 
of Cappadocia, who had been a victualer to the army, a bank- 
rupt and vagabond, but whom Athanasius had treated kindly as 
a professed convert. Bribes had won his promotion. He soon 
made attacks upon the Nicene Churches with soldiers, and a 
mob of Arians, Jews, and pagans. Houses, convents, and 
tombs were broken open in the search for the lawful bishop, 
who was safe with the hermits in the desert. The pagans 
offered their sacrifices. Women were outraged, and presbyters 
were slain. The shout arose, "Long live Constantius and the 
Arians who have abjured Christ." He repressed or banished 
some ninety bishops in his province. But George was intent 
upon riches. He sought a monopoly of the trade in papyrus, 
salt, and those painted coffins which the Egyptians admired. He 
would fleece the flock and flay the dead. The heathen grew 
enraged, a frantic mob attacked his palace. His large library 
was no refuge ; he was dragged out and torn to pieces by the 
pagans. Yet the Arian legends honor him as St. George, slain 
by the wizard Athanasius. The Crusaders painted him on their 
banners as St. George, on horseback, slaying the dragon. 
When Julian, the cousin of Constantius, came to the throne 
(361-363), the Semi-Arians lost political power. The loss car- 
ried with it their large hopes of him. Their court machinery 
*vas gone. They had trained him ever since his father and 
others of his kindred had been slain by imperial jealousy. 
They were too eager to press theology upon him and push 
him into clerical orders. He saw their intrigues and aims, 
and secretly despised them. He adroitly took lessons of Li- 
banius, who aspired to be the philosopher of paganism. In 
heart he renounced Christianity at the age of twenty. But 



JULIAN. 8? 

for ten years he wore a mask ; he secretly worshiped at pagan 
altars, and publicly read the Scriptures in Church, or observed 
the Christian rites. The close student went to Gaul and sur- 
prised Europe by his brilliant generalship. The soldiers de- 
clared him their Augustus, and he was in rebellion on the eve 
of his cousin's death. 

V. Julian's New Paganism. 

The new emperor surprised the Church by his open apos- 
tasy from it. Thenceforth his main effort was to revive pagan- 
ism by giving it a creed more monotheistic, a philosophy more 
Gnostic, rites more splendid, and organization more like the 
Christian Church, from which he borrowed his system of 
charity to the heathen poor and unfortunate. To this service 
he gave his wonderful talents, his prolific pen, and the imperial 
power during the eighteen months of his reign. He tried to 
enlist the Jews on his side by an attempt to rebuild their tem- 
ple in Jerusalem. But flames burst from the old vaults and 
destroyed the workmen, or drove them away in despair. The 
result was a new evidence of the truth of the prophetic Scrip- 
tures to which the bishop, Cyril, had pointed him. However 
rigid his morals and brilliant his genius, he was not clean 
enough for an age of growing decency. No unshorn, ragged 
hermit was more unshaven and unwashed than Julian, when he 
lived chiefly on vegetables, slept on the floor, and wore the 
dress of a sloven. 

His first policy was to tolerate all Christian sects and parties 
so that they might destroy each other. Athanasius and other 
bishops were recalled from exile. He employed his wit and 
sarcasm against them, and affected a pity for the "poor, de- 
luded Galileans, who forsook the most glorious privilege of 
men, the worship of the immortal gods, and trusted in dead 
men." To the blind Bishop Maris he tauntingly said, "Your 
Galilean God can not restore your eyesight." Maris replied, 
' ' I thank my God for my blindness, which spares me the pain- 
ful sight of such an impious apostate as thou." The bishop 
was punished. 

When Julian saw that his pagan Church caused no rush 
of people, and his writings no enthusiasm, he began to be 
more severe in his measures. He forbade Christians to teach 



88 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the arts, sciences, and classics. The schools were placed under 
heathen teachers. The pagans at Alexandria represented to 
him that Athanasius was the great enemy of their religion, 
and that he had baptized some Greek ladies of high rank. 
Soon came the edict, "I order Athanasius to leave the city at 
once. That such an intriguer should preside over the people 
is dangerous; he deserves not the name of a man." Troops 
were sent to drive him away, and if they should slay him, it 
would be as well. He escaped their fury. The great church 
was sacked and burnt. For the first and only time in her 
Christian history, pagan sacrifices were publicly offered in Con- 
stantinople. Julian offered them in the cathedral to the Public 
Genius, whose image he had there raised. His philosopher, 
Libanius, was trying to establish heathenism at Antioch. We 
shall see how the Christian women brought him to grief. Per- 
haps not five hundred intelligent men anywhere believed 
Julian's philosophy. He aimed at two very difficult things: 
to entice Christians into idolatry, and to rekindle the zeal of the 
pagans. A few graceless souls in the Church were beguiled. 
But he failed with the ardent faith of true Christians, and 
with the dead faith of the pagans. His failure made him 
angry. His wrath tended to persecution. There were a few 
martyrs in his short reign. Had he lived five years longer there 
must have been bitter war upon the whole Church. He was 
already in his Persian campaign, and in his march he took 
every care to restore the heathen gods. He died of a wound 
in battle, and possibly his dying words were, ' ' O Galilean, thou 
hast conquered!" If he did any good to the Church it was in 
drawing hypocrites out of it, weakening the Arians by the loss 
of secular power, and lessening ecclesiastical strifes by uniting 
the parties against a common enemy. He did not create an 
epoch ; he caused an episode, and provoked a tremendous 
reaction against paganism. 

VI. Orthodoxy Gaining Ground. 

The emperor Jovian (363-4) reigned but eight months, but 
he did good service for the Nicene faith; for he was tolerant to 
all parties, just, wise, intellectually orthodox. The army, which 
elected him where Julian fell, at once declared itself Christian. 
The cross was again the standard. The philosophers and sooth- 



ROMAN BISHOPS. 89 

sayers retired into obscurity. Athanasius and other exiled 
bishops were recalled. Affairs went on almost as if Julian had 
never lived. 

The Nicene faith enjoyed imperial favor in the West, where 
Valentinian I ruled eleven years (364-75). It had been firmly 
maintained by Hilary, bishop of Poitiers in Gaul (350-68), 
called the Athanasius of the West, and the Rhone of Latin 
eloquence. In mature age he had become a Christian, along 
with his wife and daughter. For opposing Arianism he had 
endured banishment in Phrygia, where the Arians held high 
sway. But he was neither vexed nor converted by their treat- 
ment. He wrote orthodox hymns, and perhaps some chapters 
of his book on the Trinity. He boldly and persistently knocked 
at the doors of councils, until the Arians of every degree were 
glad when Constantius sent him home. There he was received 
in triumph. He was busy for years in reclaiming or ejecting 
the clergy who had subscribed the creed of Rimini. In 360 he 
secured the calling of the council at Paris, in which Arianism 
was unanimously condemned. The Gallic Synods adhered to the 
Nicene doctrine. Eager to purify Italy he impeached Auxen- 
tius, bishop of Milan, as at least a Semi-Arian, but the bishop 
gave answers so nearly orthodox that Valentinian dismissed the 
case and ordered Hilary home. Milan was soon to have a 
bishop, Ambrose, in whom there was no suspicion of heresy 
nor hypocrisy. 

Rome had not been exempt from the Arian contagion in its 
violent form. Her bishop, Julius, had been a firm and active 
supporter of Athanasius in his second exile (340-7). Liberius 
had been banished by Constantius ; his chair filled by an Arian ; 
his hand had subscribed a Semi-Arian creed under pressure; he 
had been restored to his episcopate (358), and now he was or- 
thodox again. He was soon to welcome into the catholic ranks 
a troop of the men who had caused his fall, and then die (366). 
His party elected Ursicinus bishop, the other chose Damasus; 
and then a battle for rights. Churches were like fortresses, an 
armed mob fought in the streets, and about one hundred and 
thirty lives were lost in one day. After long months of struggle 
Damasus won the chair and held it for seventeen years.* Vio- 

* The noble Praetextatus, at this time the prefect of the city, said: "Make 
me bishop of Rome and I will immediately become a Christian." Ammianus 



90 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

lent as was his temper, he used well his success ; defended vigor- 
ously the Nicene faith; argued with learning and wrote with 
literary taste; improved the service of song in the Church; 
patronized Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, and merited the 
thanks of numberless pilgrims and travelers, down to our time, 
for his labor of love in the catacombs. He cleared and widened 
the passages, and made visible the once hidden tombs of mar- 
tyrs. He employed an artist to engrave on marble the beautiful 
inscriptions in letters known as the "Damasine Character." 

Semi-Arianism lost ground under Valens (364-78), the 
brother and co-emperor of Valentinian. He was an extreme 
Arian — perhaps by means of his wife.* He was "rude without 
vigor and feeble without mildness." Both these emperors were 
severe upon magic and idolatry, and each bore hard upon the 
creed of the other. For the first time heathenism was officially 
designated paganism, the religion of the pagus, or peasants' 
village, where the ignorant still clung to it. In the cities it was 
dying, not yet dead. 

Valens persecuted the Semi-Arians, and on this fact their 
destiny turned. They had found themselves in the ill company 
of worse heretics, and were trying to cut loose from it. They 
had managed most of the eighty councils held during forty 
years, and still their faith lacked scientific statement. Never 
were there so many creed-makers and such unsatisfactory creeds 
made. Yet this party did some good service. It cleared off 
some greater heresies. Revolting from the Arian extremists, 
it swung back towards catholicity. It had some truth-loving 
bishops, as Cyril of Jerusalem, and Basil of Ancyra. Hilary 
said, ' ' The ears and hearts of the priests and people are better 
than their heads." Those who sincerely loved the Son of God 
and were earnest in their pastoral teachings, had left debate to 
theologians, and had studied to use language which their simple, 



Marcellinus, doubtless a pagan, but respectful to Christianity, writes of the bish- 
ops at Rome as "enriched by the gifts of matrons, riding in carriages, dressing 
splendidly, and feasting luxuriously." (Hist, xxvii, iii, 14.) The worldliness 
was not confined to Roman prelates. ' 

* Maimbourg noticed that the Arians owed no little to the influence of Con- 
stantia over her brother Constantine, of Eusebia over her husband Constantius, 
and of Dominica over Valens; but he thought that God used the Empress 
Flacilla to prevent the heresy from entering the court of Theodosius, and Clo- 
tilda influenced Clovis to put it down in Gaul. 



THREE CAPPADOCIAN DOCTORS. 91 

uneducated hearers would receive for their salvation. They 
would follow their leaders, and the best of their leaders were on 
the track to the creed of Nice. Dr. Newman says that this 
part of the history shows "the remarkable manner in which 
Divine Providence made use of error itself as a preparation for 
truth ; that is, employing the lighter forms of it in sweeping 
away those of a more offensive nature." 

In 366 the fiery Valens was about to take every eastern 
shelter away from the Semi-Arians. They sought the protec- 
tion of Valentinian, then absent in Gaul. Their deputies went 
to Rome, met the bishop Liberius, recited the Nicene creed 
as the faith of their party, and thus gained recognition as or- 
thodox. So about sixty* bishops passed over to the Nicenists ; 
thirty-four did not then go with them. But the ancient Semi- 
Arians soon disappeared from history, unless we find them 
among the Goths and kindred Teutons. 

Orthodoxy was not a safeguard from the zeal of Valens. If 
we may credit Socrates, eighty of the clergy who visited him 
at Nicomedia with a petition for relief were placed on board a 
ship and burnt at sea. The policy of banishing bishops was 
renewed in the East. Valens sent an officer to drive out Atha- 
nasius. It was then that the "founder of theology" hid in his 
father's tomb. The people demanded his return. Henceforth 
no Arian could move the emperor to disturb him. He finished 
those writings which were long the armory of the Nicenists. 
The Athanasian creed was doubtless written by some of his 
followers in Gaul or Africa. A monk said: "When you find 
any sentence of Athanasius, and have no paper, write it on 
your clothes." A contemporary said in his eulogy: "He de- 
parted this life (373) with far greater honor and glory than he 
had received when he returned from his banishments; so much 
was his death lamented by all good men, and the immortal 
glory of his name remained imprinted in their hearts." 

Thus spoke Gregory Nazianzen, one of the three Cappa- 
docian doctors, who helped to win the victory of the Nicene 
theology. The other two were Basil and his brother Gregory, 
of Nyssa. The last and youngest was a monk, then a married 
bishop in little Nyssa, a quiet man of thought rather than of 
action, who put the wealth of his metaphysical mind into writ- 

* Socrates iv, 12, gives sixty-five names. 



92 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ings against the heresies of his time, and into commentaries, 
histories, homilies, and books of theology. With Origen, he 
believed in the final restoration of all men through Christ. 

Basil the Great (329-379) was the son of wealthy parents, 
whose ancestors had been martyrs and confessors, three of 
whose sons became bishops, and their daughter, Macrina, a 
highly cultured nun. He gave his wealth to the poor, and 
always lived in the plainest style. His early life ran close with 
that of the Gregory, whose father was a married bishop at the 
market town of Nazianzen, and his mother, the devout Nonna, 
one of the noblest Christian women of ancient times. These 
two young men, of the same age, studied in several of the best 
schools. At Athens one of them said of Prince Julian, their 
fellow-student: "What evil is the Roman Empire here educat- 
ing for itself?" He could not draw them to the lectures of the 
sophists, who were tempting other students with their pagan 
philosophy. "We knew only two streets of the city," said 
Gregory , ' ' the first and more excellent led to the churches and 
the ministers of the altar; the other, which we did not so highly 
esteem, led to the schools and the teachers of the sciences. 
The streets to the theaters, games, and places of unholy, amuse- 
ments, we left to others. Our sole aim was to be called and to 
be Christians." Basil's plea for the study of the classics (along 
with Scripture as a safeguard) was often circulated in the Middle 
Ages by promoters of learning. In these friends we begin to 
find a Christian love of art and of nature. They were charmed 
with the works as well as the Word of God. When they were 
monks together in the romantic wilds of Pontus, they grew 
enthusiastic as they left their little hut, rambled down the 
mountain stream, gazed on the waterfall, struck out into the 
ravines, scared the herds of deer which rarely saw a hunter, 
admired "the lovely singing of the birds and the richness of 
the blooming plants," and returned to pray, study the Holy 
Scriptures, and make extracts from the works of Origen.* 



* Humboldt thought that Basil's descriptions of landscape and forest life 
were more like those of modern times than any that have come down to us 
from Greek or Roman antiquity. Basil and Gregory, Chrysostom and Ambrose, 
were true poets, who loved nature none the less on account of their fervent 
Christianity. Not all the monks of that age gave their whole time to the con- 
templation of themselves. 



BASIL. 93 

Basil may have uttered the feelings of many a cultured monk 
of that day when he wrote : ' ' I have well forsaken the city as 
the source of a thousand evils, but I have not been able to for- 
sake myself. I am like a man who, not accustomed to the 
waters, becomes seasick, and gets out of the rocking ship into 
a small skiff, but still keeps the dizziness and nausea." But he 
goes on to say that the best means for taming the wild passions 
and securing piety are retirement from worldly pursuits, soli- 
tude, celibacy, prayer, ascetic severity of outward life, contem- 
plation, the company of godly men, and the constant study of 
the Holy Scriptures. Such were the common ideas of that age 
when ministers of the Church came from the monasteries of the 
desert. The cell or the cloister became to many men their 
theological school. About the same time each of these young 
men was made a presbyter against his own will. This was not 
always a safe method, but here, in each case, the voice of the 
people was the voice of God. Basil, an eloquent preacher, 
eminent theologian, and vigorous writer, became famous for 
administrative ability. "A shepherd of souls and a Church 
ruler," Gregory won the title of "The Theologian," and the 
finest orator of the Greek Church, except Chrysostom. 

When Basil became bishop of his native city, Neo-Csesarea, 
in 370, he had under his care fifty pastors and parishes, all 
quite staunch in the Nicene faith. It was not a promising field 
for the Arians, unless they could oust the popular bishop. 
They pressed Valens hard to reduce Cappadocia to their doc- 
trines. He threatened Basil with confiscation, banishment, and 
even death. "Nothing more?" replied the bishop. "Not one 
of these things touch me. His property can not be forfeited 
who has none left but some worn clothes and a few books. 
Banishment I know not ; for, as the guest of God, all places are 
alike to me. For martyrdom I am unfit, but death is a bene- 
factor if it send me speedily to heaven." Sorrow entered the 
palace at Antioch; a little prince was at the point of death. 
Valens sent in haste for Basil, to whose prayers were ascribed 
the recovery of the child, and of an officer who had treated 
the bishop with rudeness. No more threats were made. His 
influence extended over a wider realm than that of Valens, for 
no other man of his time did more to promote unity in the 
catholic faith throughout all Christendom. He died in 379, 



94 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

under a weight of labors, cares, and trials, but full of joy and 
hope. Pagans joined with Christians in lamenting his death. 

Basil is a representative man. He is the type of moderation, 
charity, the better monasticism, and administrative power. For 
fifty years there had been sharp controversy between pastors 
and bishops and all who loved strife, or went into it defensively 
for the sake of truth and conscience. He sought to avoid 
extreme terms and measures, maintain the essentials of sound 
doctrine, conciliate parties who strove about words to no profit, 
and thus save both the truth and the people. The real and 
final victory of the Nicene theology was due far more to such 
men as Basil than to the Emperor Theodosius and his severe 
measures. "The high catholic party" rebuked him for being 
too liberal or unwilling to fight for phrases, but his writings 
prove that he was not lax in the doctrines which then called 
for defense. 

Basil represents a system of charity. From the time when 
the first believers had their common fund for the relief of the 
poor, the Church had been the nurse of the unfortunate, whom 
the heathen neglected. She had laid the foundation for all the 
alms houses, hospitals, and asylums which have since risen for 
the needy, the sick, the wounded, the blind, and the insane. 
Julian had imitated the system.* Near his own city Basil 
founded that magnificent hospital, the Basilias, which was reck- 
oned "one of the miracles of the world," and became the 
model for similar establishments in other quarters. He visited 
and preached to the multitudes gathered in it, and treated as 
his brethren the lepers for whom special provisions were made. 

The name of Basil is eminent in the history of monasticism. 
He and Gregory were about the first to bring theological stu- 
dies into the cloister. He provided the monasteries and nun- 
neries with clergy, and gave system to their rules of life. His 
reforms related to purity of manners, celibacy, and labor for 
support, in which each hale monk must do "a good day's 
work;" hours for meditations, hymns, and prayers; the read- 
ing of the Scriptures, study, and instruction. He saw his rules 
adopted by some eighty thousand monks, who were building 
convents in all lands between Edessa in the East and Tours in 
Gaul, where St. Martin taught his monks to be missionaries. 

•Note III. 



EPHRAEM SYRUS. 95 

Basil represents the episcopal power of his age. He was 
an ecclesiastical prefect, or the archbishop of a province, ac- 
cording to the system which Constantine had introduced, and 
the Council of Nice had confirmed. He was an exemplary 
pastor of pastors, visiting his diocese, preaching almost daily, 
and placing good shepherds over the flocks. It was then con- 
sidered no abuse of his power for him to attempt the pressing 
of a deacon into a bishop's chair, and to force a presbyter into 
a bishop's charge. There are two examples, none the less 
striking on account of their partial failure. 

In the far East, at Edessa, lived a wonderful hermit, named 
Ephraem, the son of a heathen priest. In his travels for wis- 
dom he was in Egypt, and at the Council of Nice. Still later 
he visited Basil, who ordained him a deacon. The hermit went 
back to his cavern, where he mastered his high temper, and 
wrote homilies, commentaries, tracts against all sorts of here- 
sies, and fine hymns for the people to sing in place of the 
Gnostic songs of Bardesanes. He went out among the idola- 
ters, and told them of the living God. He preached to the 
monks and people with great effect. He taught scores of stu- 
dents. Two men came from Basil with a commission to ordain 
him a bishop. He behaved as strangely as David once did 
in Gath, and the messengers went and reported that poor 
Ephraem was out of his mind. "No," said Basil, "you are 
the simpletons; he is full of divine wisdom." A famine brought 
a pestilence into Edessa. Thousands looked death in the face. 
The hermit called together the people, and in a powerful ser- 
mon told the rich that they would lose their souls if they did 
not relieve the poor. He was intrusted with supplies. He 
took a house, fitted up three hundred beds, and attended to 
the sufferers until the calamity was ended. Then he returned 
to his cell, lived a few days, and died soon after his friend 
Basil. He was the most eminent poet, orator, and theologian 
of the ancient Syrian Church, and was called its pillar, and 
"the harp of the Holy Ghost." He was the Origen of the 
far East. He expounded the Scriptures to multitudes of young 
men, and thus arose the famous school of Edessa, the rival of 
that of Antioch. 

Basil wanted a bishop at Sasima, a wretched little town at 
three cross-roads, where carters brawled, stage-drivers changed 



g6 history of the christian church. 

horses, pagan travelers cursed the landlord, and revenue officers 
thought themselves and the custom-house the pride of the 
place. He urged Gregory to go there as a country bishop.* 
''Your elevation must have caused you to forget what is due 
to our long friendship," was the reply; for Gregory felt almost 
insulted. At last he submitted, and was ordained. But he 
did not go to Sasima. He was simply assistant bishop at Na- 
zianzen till his father's death ; and then he went again sadly 
into solitude, where the old love for the archbishop returned. 
After a few years he writes mournfully over the death of Basil, 
and says: "My body is sickly, age creeps on, cares entangle, 
duties overwhelm me, friends are unfaithful, the Church lacks 
capable pastors, good declines, evil stalks naked. The ship is 
going in the darkness, light nowhere, Christ asleep. What is 
to be done? Death seems the only release — if I were but 
ready for it!" 

Gregory's pastoral work was now to begin, and, to his sur- 
prise, at the very capital. Basil had wished him to take charge 
of the little orthodox band at Constantinople, and revive their 
Church. It seemed like trying to raise the dead. There the 
Arians had been in full sway for nearly forty years. Novatians 
and Apollinarians were growing in strength. The Nicenists 
scarcely dared to lift up their heads in 380, when Gregory un- 
expectedly came to them. They were disappointed in the sad- 
looking man, so bent and feeble, so wretchedly dressed, such a 
very hermit in his manners, the last preacher for that fashionable 
city. He began to tell the good news from God in the house 
of a kinsman. One hearer brought two more the next time. 
Indeed, he was unlike the sleek Arian clergy. They said he was 
a polytheist : people went to be assured. The house was trans- 
formed to a chapel — the Anastasia, the Resurrection. Heretics 
and pagans insulted him, stoned him, broke into the chapel by 
night and profaned it, and charged him with the tumult. His 
defense before a magistrate turned all these outrages to the 
victory of his cause. Some went to listen to his eloquence; 
others to hear what an Athanasian really believed, or to learn 
the lessons of personal and practical religion ; and all were sat- 
isfied. The report of him went abroad. Even Jerome, fifty 



* Chor-efiscopos, one who seems to have been the equal of both a presbyter 
and a bishop. 



NOTES TO CHAPTER V. gj 

years old, came from Syria, and grew wiser in the interpreta- 
tion of Scripture. The Anastasia was not a misnomer. The 
chapel was too small for the crowds that pressed to its doors. 
It gave way to a splendid cathedral in later years. We leave 
Gregory until Theodosius comes to rout the Arians and offer 
him the grandest of their churches. 



NOTES. 

I. Causes of the decline of Arianism (besides its inherent nature and 
the divine providence). I. It did not assume a schismatic form, and unify 
its elements. A sect might have consolidated its forces. 2. It depended 
largely on the secular powers, misused them, created weariness and disgust, 
and finally lost their aid. 3. It lacked eminent leaders, of wisdom, admin- 
istrative talent, and doctrinal harmony. 4. Strifes arose in its ranks, and 
the parties grew more violent toward each other than toward the Nicenists. 
They secured no great council. 5. They made too many creeds — from 
twelve to eighteen — and the world knew not what they believed. Some of 
them lost respect even with the pagans. 6. The sincere Semi-Arians went 
over mainly to the orthodox side. 7. Meanwhile the Nicenists (not altogether 
free from blame in their measures) adhered to one creed, unified their forces, 
employed the more spiritual means, retained more popular respect, and won 
sympathy by their endurances. The Emperors Jovian, Valentinian, Gratian, 
and Theodosius supported them. Their cause was advanced by an array 
of theologians such as Athanasius, the three Cappadocians, Damasus, Hil- 
ary, Epiphanius, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Innocent, Leo, and Augus- 
tine. 8. New controversies arose in theology, and the remaining Arians of 
the East seem to have cast in their lot with new heretics. 

II. The episcopal system. It was a gradual growth. In the gradation 
of clerical offices, recognized by the Nicene Council, were deacons, presby- 
ters, bishops, rural bishops [chorepiscopoi\ archbishops, and metropolitans. 
Certain of the latter were afterwards known as patriarchs. The five patri- 
archates were Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople. 
The Bishop of Rome was not yet a supreme pope. The great council of 
381, at Constantinople, decreed that the patriarch of that city should be next 
to the Bishop of Rome. This offended the Bishop of Alexandria, who 
claimed to be the equal of both. Between the three there were long con- 
troversies. "Aerius denied the superiority of bishops over presbyters, the 
lawfulness of oblations made for the dead, and the religious obligation of 
fasts and feasts." The Scriptural equality of presbyter and bishop was ad- 
mitted by Jerome, Chrysostom, Augustine, and Theodoret. 

III. Christian charity commetided by Julian. He wrote to the pagan 
chief-priest of Galatia : "Establish hospitals in every town for the care of the 
sick and of strangers, and extending humanity to the poor. I will furnish the 



98 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

means. For it is our shame that no Jew ever begs, and the impious Galileans 
not only keep their own poor, but even many of ours, whom we leave to 
suffer." To another of his priests he wrote: "The impious Galileans, see- 
ing that our priests neglect the poor, have applied themselves to that work. 
They have led many of our faithful ones into infidelity, by commencing 
with charity, hospitality, and the service of tables ; for they have many 
names for these works, which they practice abundantly." Thus Julian, in 
pure defense, had to borrow from the hated Christians the ornaments for 
his reformed paganism, or it would appear so bald and heartless that it 
would lose its votaries. This was not the only form of Christian benevo- 
lence. Some devoted large possessions to the gratuitous distribution of the 
Scriptures ; some, in support of missionaries ; others, to the redemption of 
captives, even selling themselves into slavery in order to secure the lib- 
erty of those whom they loved, or the Church greatly needed. One class 
made a merit of giving all their property to such objects, and becoming poor 
hermits. It was thought that poverty and piety were inseparable, in a pastor 
especially. But a large mass of Christians had common sense and wealth 
along with their spiritual graces. 

IV. Persecution in Persia. King Sapor (310-381) seemed determined 
to crush the Christians. They appealed to Constantius ; but this only 
brought severer woes. In 344 they were offered the choice between fire- 
worship and death. " During fifty years the cross lay prostrate in blood 
and ashes, till it was once more erected by the Nestorians." When Sapor 
learned that his son had been barbarously executed by Constantius he took 
his revenge on the innocent Christians of Armenia, and went so far in his 
annihilating zeal as to order all their books to be burnt. The Persians 
claim to have the names of sixteen thousand martyrs of this period. If 
genuine, the persecution must have exceeded those of any Roman emperors. 



THEODOSIUS. 



99 



Chapter VI. 

TWO GREAT REACTIONS. 



History keeps before us the law of advance and reaction. 
The Arian, the Athanasian, and the pagan felt its strong force 
in the events of the time. It often turned upon the edict of 
an emperor, whose right to dictate in religious affairs was rarely 
questioned by a favored party. Toleration was not understood 
by the wisest rulers, nor intellectual liberty by the best people. 
Not a general freedom of belief, but the dominance of a special 
creed, was too often sought by parties in the Church. We 
find that the Nicenists were quite as joyful over the edicts of 
Theodosius as the Arians had been over the decrees of Con- 
stantius. They did not question his right to issue them in their 
own favor. But, with all his rigor and high temper, he was a 
nobler man, and a more just ruler. His edicts were not less 
severe, but were more legally executed. He gave more work 
to the magistrates, but less indulgence to the mob. He was 
as fully resolved to see approved bishops over the great 
Churches, but less disposed to install them by soldiers. There 
was less intrigue at court, less bloodshed in cathedrals, less 
bitter exile of bishops, and more deference to lawful councils. 
He used the means of the age. Pagans and Arians had em- 
ployed force ; if right for them, it was fair for him. Two de- 
clining systems fell — Arianism and paganism. 

Theodosius, a young general and a duke, had retired to his 
estates in his native Spain, after his father had been murdered 
by Valens on some military pretense. Valens had Arianized the 
Goths, deceived them, and been slain by them in a battle in 
Thrace. The farmer left his plow at the call of Gratian, and 
defeated the Goths. He then took the throne* of the Arian 



* Gratian in the West, 375-383 ; Theodosius in the East, 379-392, and sole 
emperor, 392-395. His sons ruled over a divided empire — Arcadius being in 



100 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

emperor. His father's creed and fate, his contempt of pagan 
art, his disgust of heresies, and his desire to see a united em- 
pire, led him to adopt the policy of his colleague, and make it 
more vigorous when he became sole emperor. Four labors of 
this Hercules went on together: i. The union and defense 
of the empire. He induced the Goths * to settle in peace on 
both sides of the Hellespont. He merely staved off their inva- 
sions. 2. The supremacy of the Nicene faith. 3. The sup- 
pression of heresy and schism. 4. The destruction of paganism. 

In 380, when sick in his camp at Thessalonica, he sent for 
the bishop, and was baptized. His gratitude for health was 
marred by his severity. He published an edict authorizing the 
adherents of the Nicene creed to assume the title of Catholic 
Christians ; he branded all dissenters as heretics, whose conven- 
ticles must not be called churches. He virtually laid down the 
terms of communion, and soon applied this law at Constanti- 
nople, when he ordered the Arian bishop, Demophilus, to sub- 
scribe the Nicene creed or resign his charge. The bishop re- 
fused. Another edict turned him and all the Arians out of the 
churches of the city, though not out of their homes. They 
pitched their tents for worship outside the walls. Other dis- 
senters held their meetings in the suburbs. The emperor 
thought it was simple justice to restore the churches to the 
orthodox, from whom they had been taken forty years before. 
He intrusted the great Church of the Apostles to Gregory, and 
marched with him to take charge of it. The bishop was sad ; 
the day was gloomy; the Arians said the clouds were an ill 
omen. Soldiers were on guard. The procession entered the 
doors, singing psalms, when a burst of sunlight filled the cathe- 
dral, as if it were the sign of a peaceful revolution. There 
was no riot, as in the former change of creeds. One sword 
was drawn, and it was against Gregory, who knew it not until 
a young man came to his room and confessed it. The bishop 
said to him : ' ' Thy daring deed has made thee mine. Hence- 
forth live as my son, and God's child." Orthodoxy was in 
power at the eastern capital. 

Theodosius must have his great synod. It met in 381, 

the East, 395-408 ; Honorius in the West, 395-423, with Ravenna as the seat 
of government. 

* See Chapter VIII, I. 



EDICTS. 10 1 

at Constantinople, and is called the second general Council. 
Only one hundred and fifty bishops, all Oriental, were present. 
They slightly modified the Nicene creed, gave more prominence 
to Holy Scripture, affirmed their belief in the personality and 
divinity of the Holy Spirit, and dropped the anathema. They 
removed certain unworthy bishops and condemned various 
heresies. * Gregory presided a part of the time, but his right 
was questioned, for he had not been formally released from 
little Sasima. He took offense, grew disgusted with partisan 
strifes, and offered to retire, saying, "I will be a second Jonah, 
and give myself for the salvation of the ship, though I did not 
raise the storm." He rashly threw up all his offices, bade fare- 
well to his " sweet Anastasia, " and passed the eight remaining 
years of his life at Nazianzen, and in the deserts, where he 
lived as a monk, wrote poetry as a penance, and left us to 
regret that he was too sensitive, and too devoted to bad health. 
Still we love him for seeking to convert heretics to ''the 
Blessed Trinity," rather than hurl useless anathemas at them. 
If that age did not have a dozen bishops with worse tempers 
and worldlier motives, history has done them injustice. Their 
variances prompted the emperor to enact severer measures in 
order to support a cause which they were likely to disgrace. 

Theodosius published edicts which forbade the Arian sects 
and the Manicheans to hold any meetings in the cities, or 
even in the country. Any building or ground thus used was 
to be confiscated to the state. Men who allowed themselves 
to be ordained priests or bishops by any heretics were to be 
banished. Death was threatened to those whose heresies were 
the most gross, and even to those who kept Easter on 
the Jewish day. If a Christian became a pagan, he could 
not legally dispose of his property by a will ; as a pagan 
he had no civil rights. The man who would be sure of his 
liberty, home, wealth, and life, must profess the creed of the 
emperor. It was long ago said that his design was rather to 
terrify and convert than actually to punish the dissenters, and 






Y- 



* Especially the Arian, Apollinarian, and Macedonian. Converts from 
them and the Novatians were to be "anointed with the holy chrism on the fore- 
head, eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, that they might receive the Holy Ghost." 
Penitent Montanists and Sabellians were to be treated as repentant heathen, 
and exorcised at baptism. 



102 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

that the penalties were rarely enforced. The heretics had not 
the spirit of martyrs, and their numbers rapidly diminished. 
Such wide-sweeping decrees could hardly be executed. 

Thus the theory and law of persecution for heresy came 
into the Christian state, and thence into the Church catholic. 
It was brought in by emperors. It spots the character of 
Theodosius. While his severities chill us, we may find a ten- 
derness to warm our admiration. He confirmed the decree of 
Valentinian for the release of criminals on Easter-day, saying, 
" Would to God that I could raise the dead!" He was the first 
to allow mothers a right to be guardians over their children. 
Children sold into slavery by poor fathers should be free. 

No heretics seem to have suffered death by Theodosius in 
the East. But we are pointed to one scaffold in the West. 
In Spain the nobly born and eloquent bishop, Priscillian, was 
twice condemned for Manichean doctrines. He appealed to 
Maximus, who headed a revolt, murdered Gratian, and claimed 
to be an emperor in Gaul, and a Christian. Priscillian and six 
adherents went to Treves, in 385, to answer the charges of an 
unworthy bishop, who accused them of heresy and gross im- 
morality. They were examined by torture and sentenced to 
death. One bishop in the small council disapproved of the 
penalty. St. Martin, of Tours, hurried up to Treves, and ob- 
tained from Maximus a promise that their lives should be 
spared. But they were beheaded. So Maximus, the usurper, 
was "the first Christian prince who shed the blood of his 
Christian subjects on account of their religious opinions." The 
Christian Church generally viewed the act with horror. St. 
Martin and Ambrose, of Milan, broke all fellowship with the 
bishops who had sanctioned the deed, and yet they had little 
indulgence for heathens and heretics. Chrysostom recom- 
mended love to both those classes, and declared against their 
execution ; but he approved those measures of Theodosius 
which forbade the meetings of heretics and schismatics, and 
confiscated their churches. Jerome seems to have justified the 
penalty of death upon a heretic,* and with him some of the 



* He cited Deut. xiii, 6-10. All such men thought that heresy was a crime 
against God and man ; and that the powers of the state and the Church were 
divinely authorized to inflict death upon soul-destroying error, as well as upon 
murder. 



DOWNFALL OF PAGANISM. 103 

best fathers agreed. Such punishment was rare for several 
centuries. Pleas for toleration came from the persecuted. The 
Donatists had been the first to appeal to Constantine, but 
when they were under the ban, their bishop, Gaudentius nobly 
said, "God appointed prophets and fishermen, not princes and 
soldiers, to spread the faith." 

It was now the turn of the pagans to suffer. They, as well 
as the Arians, had provoked a reaction. Julian had pushed 
heathenism to the front in his zeal to revive, reorganize, and 
adorn the system with borrowed graces. He had roused against 
it all the forces which the later emperors could command. It 
must be driven back to the shades. The reaction was one 
of the mightiest in history. It was the resurge of faith and 
patriotism against a rebellion. Once it had been paganism 
against Christianity; now it was Christianity against paganism. 
The movement began anew when Valens and Valentinian for- 
bade heathen sacrifices and magic ; ordered soothsayers to be 
burnt and sophists banished ; broke up the nests of treason 
which were sheltered by philosophy ; and commissioned men 
to ferret out and destroy all books that promoted heathen 
worship. Times had changed since the book-burning days of 
Diocletian. If senators were unjustly treated by suspicious 
magistrates, and philosophers threw libraries into the fire, they 
had reason to remember the furious attack upon Christian liter- 
ature. In each case the injustice was greater than the actual 
loss to any valuable science. Gratian lent new vigor to the 
movement when he abolished the office of Pontifex Maxhmis, 
confiscated temple property, cut off the pay of priests and 
vestals, and left the pagans to bear the expenses of their own 
worship — if they dared to meet at their altars. 

The movement culminated in the edicts of Theodosius. 
Nowhere must pagan worship of any sort be allowed. Some 
temples had been closed, others turned into Christian churches, 
but in many heathenism was in cautious activity. These must 
no longer be the abodes of the gods; their images and furni- 
ture must be destroyed, their wealth confiscated, their priests 
deprived of salary, their doors shut forever against idolaters. 
The temples might stand as monuments of art, and memorials 
of the victories of Christ. But the work became a war upon 
paganism, and in the war the monks enlisted, as if Providence 



104 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

had reared them for this purpose. They began in the smaller 
towns, where the rustic pagans ascribed their prosperity to the 
gods, and placed their farms, gardens, flocks, and homes under 
their protection. They had a god in every field, in every grove, 
by every road and every fountain. The monks came in fury, 
as if to grind all these rude idols to powder. They grew 
bolder. They marched into the cities. They battered down a 
stately temple at Edessa, and another at Palmyra. One at 
Gaza was closed; another in Petra, whose magnificent ruins 
are still a wonder, was defended by the worshipers. At Apa- 
mea, fifty miles south of Antioch, Bishop Marcellus led the 
assailants, when the great temple of Jupiter was undermined. 
Though lame, he took the field with troops of monks, soldiers, 
and gladiators, swept the country, and laid waste every thing 
that represented heathenism. This crusader was seized by the 
pagans and burnt alive. The synod of that province honored 
"the holy Marcellus as a martyr in the cause of God." 

We pass to Alexandria, where the attempt to reconcile 
pagan philosophy with Christian doctrine had failed. The one 
had grown morose and sullen, the other had nurtured heresies. 
The parties should never have married, and they had engaged 
in a long quarrel. The center of paganism there was the Ser- 
apion, a vast temple. The worshipers said that the safety of 
the universe depended on the preservation of the colossal image 
of Serapis. They were enraged at Bishop Theophilus for expos- 
ing their licentious rites and putting them to ridicule. They 
organized the mob. The streets were desecrated with human 
gore. Many Christians were slain. The pagans shut themselves 
up in the Serapion and fortified it. Theodosius sent word that 
the people should be spared, and persuaded to a better faith, 
but the temples of that city should be destroyed. The pagans 
fled, the priests sailed for Italy. The grand temple was rifled 
by the party of Theophilus, who wondered at the power of a 
loadstone and ascribed it to magic. The fine library was 
removed. But they stood in silent awe before the image of 
Serapis, until the bishop ordered an assault. A soldier mounted 
a ladder, battle-ax in hand, bruised a knee, struck off a cheek, 
hurled the head on the stone floor, and the only sign of life 
shown by the image was a large colony of rats which had lived 
by idolatry. The sublime gave way to the ridiculous, and the 



ST. MARTIN OF TOURS. 105 

heathen joined in the merriment. The work went on through 
all Egypt. Fifteen miles from Alexandria was Canopus, so 
named from the god of moisture, and full of profligate heathen. 
Theophilus marched upon it, leveled its temple, and turned the 
town into a city of monks. 

In Gaul was St. Martin, the son of a heathen captain in 
Pannonia, a catechumen at twelve, a soldier till twenty, a stu- 
dent with Hilary of Poitiers, almost a martyr by the Arians at 
Milan, a monk on some little island, a founder of monasteries, 
an ardent missionary in wild places, and now bishop of Tours, 
living in a cell near his church. Cities and synods were his 
dislike. He loved to preach to rude heathens and lead them to 
Christ. He impersonated the hatred of the monks against 
paganism. He marched as their general, made wide campaigns, 
and was the spiritual Caesar of vast conquests. At one place 
he so preached to a savage crowd that the heathen rushed to 
their temple and destroyed it. He took care to plant churches 
and monasteries wherever he rooted out idolatry. Pagan cus- 
toms were too often baptized with a Christian name and retained 
in the Church. He once mistook a harmless funeral train for 
an idolatrous procession, and imprudently routed it. His own 
funeral was not so likely to be disturbed, for two thousand 
brethren followed him to the grave, and regarded him as the vic- 
torious champion over heathenism in Gaul. Often had he said, 
"I shrink from no labor," and now he had gone to his rest. 

Among the few eminent pleaders* for paganism was the sen- 
ator Symmachus at Rome, a man worthy of the days of Cicero. 
He heard the order for the removal of the statue of victory 
from the senate-house, and the withholding of salaries from the 
priests and vestals. He sent up his apology. He argued that 
all religions were good ; that all worshipers adore the same God ; 
and that every citizen should conform to the mode of worship 
which is bound up with the history and glory of his country. 
"I am too old to change my religion; let me retain my gods." 
Ambrose, of Milan, replied to him: "Did the national gods 



* Julian's philosopher, Libanius, argued that the temples were essential to 
national prosperity. He urged that the Christians had condemned religious 
persecution, and he protested against it quite in the style of the early Christian 
apologists. At Alexandria Olympus put forth his plea for paganism. Theon 
was educating his daughter, Hypatia, to be its last eloquent defender. 



106 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

really protect Rome? Did they drive off Hannibal? Did they 
ward off the Gauls? Was it the arm of the gods, or the timely 
cry of geese, that saved the capitol?" There were Christian 
senators who demanded the removal of the statue, and it went. 
Men said: "Victory forsook her adorer, and, by deserting to 
Ambrose, showed that she loved her enemies better than her 
friends." The temples were deserted. Many of the old Roman 
families, like the Gracchi, exchanged Jupiter for Christ. The 
senate renounced paganism, and still later the Pantheon became 
a church. And yet the old enemy was not entirely destroyed. 
Idolatry lingered at Rome, and philosophy lived longest at 
Athens. Pagans were still in the service of Theodosius. Sym- 
machus died a consul. They still had free thought, free 
tongues, and a free pen. Not their better philosophy, but 
their idolatry, was under the ban. Paganism no longer ruled 
the empire, nor seriously threatened the Church in an external 
form. For other causes of its overthrow we must look to the 
Goths and the missionaries. 

But elements of paganism had entered into the thought and 
manners of the Christian world. * We can not ignore the fact 
that much of the apparent success of the Church had been 
gained by her accommodation to heathen sentiments, customs, 
and superstitions. She had compromised with the society which 
she had sought to convert. Many rites of the pagan temple 
were brought into the Christian chapel. The process went on 
until she was described by Jerome as "greater in riches, less 
in virtues," and he confesses the dangerous charms of pagan 
literature which then had a life that has since perished. Here 
was the peril of the time ; the great churchmen saw and resisted 
it. Yet too many yielded. Probably an extreme case is that 
of Synesius, a descendant of the Spartan kings, a disciple of 
the pagan Hypatia, a famous man of letters and a philosopher. 
W 7 hen the Church of Ptolemais entreated him to become its 
pastor, he replied that his life was not pure enough, that he 



* "The virtues of the primitive Church had heen under the safeguards of 
persecution and poverty. She grew weaker in the day of triumph. Enthusiasm 
was less pure, existence less self-denying, and among the ever-increasing number 
of proselytes were many vicious men. They became (nominal) Christians out 
of ambition, for interest, to please the court, to appear faithful to the emper- 
ors. . . . When all the wealth and all the favor had passed over to Christianity, 
there was no longer the same simplicity in the public worship." (Yillemain). 



AMBROSE OF MILAN. IO7 

had a wife and children whom he would not abandon, that he 
did not believe the human soul is born with the body, and that 
he questioned the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. He 
said: "I am a Platonist, not a Christian." But the people 
allowed him his wife, his opinions, his pagan philosophy, and 
made him their bishop. Until his death, about 430, he was 
zealous and courageous in his office. He wrote hymns and 
tracts, but his chief service was rendered to Platonism. He 
helped transfer it from the Greek to the Latin realm of thought. 
The great Leo, bishop of Rome (440), laments the deep corrup- 
tion of Christian society, and warns his flock against relapses 
into heathenism, for the old enemy was ensnaring believers. 
But before his time a powerful Western Church was willing to 
risk her welfare by choosing for her bishop a man of the 
world; happily the risk was not perilous in the election of 
Ambrose, one of the noblest Romans. 

Ambrose did more than any other man to advance the 
measures of Gratian and Theodosius, and still to check the 
abuses of imperial power. He was the son of a governor at 
Treves. As a well-educated, eloquent, able, and honest lawyer, 
he gained distinction at Milan, the usual residence of the West- 
ern emperor. When elected president of Upper Italy he was 
ordered to "act not the judge, but the bishop." The strifes 
between religious parties were threatening the peace of the 
city. The bishop, Auxentius, had sought to make it the 
stronghold of Arianism in the West. He was treated with gen- 
tleness. When he died the people met in the church to elect 
a successor. Day after day they failed ; their voices grew 
louder and angrier, and there was danger of a riot. Ambrose 
went into the pulpit to allay the storm. A child seemed to 
think he was preaching, and cried out, "Ambrose is bishop." 
All parties took it for the voice of God, and shouted, "Let 
Ambrose be bishop." The more he blushed in surprise the 
louder the outbursts of joy. He protested, begged, argued 
that he was only a catechumen, tried to hide and run away, 
but the only terms that he could make were that he should be 
baptized and ordained by orthodox hands. Eight days after- 
wards, in 374, he was consecrated Bishop of Milan. Basil was 
profuse in his congratulations. Arianism was now hopeless 
in the West. 



M- 



108 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Ambrose sold his estates, gave an allowance to his sister, 
the nun Marcella, and the rest went to the poor. He lived 
in the plainest style, studied the Scriptures and the Fathers, 
preached almost daily, wrote various books, and lived as the 
pastor of his flock. As a bishop he was the Basil of the West. 
Both of them, along with Chrysostom, paid special attention to 
the hymns, chants, music, and prayers of the Church.* From 
their age, if not from them, have come the oldest genuine lit- 
urgies which have been preserved, but these soon received 
large additions. 

Ambrose refused a church to the Arians, the most clam- 
orous of whom were Gothic soldiers and the courtiers of Jus- 
tina, the widow of Valentinian. She had concealed her heresy 
w r hile her husband lived. As an empress she caused a tumult 
of people, and had to ask him to appease it. Again they 
rose for war. He and many of his flock took refuge in the 
cathedral, fortified it, and there held religious services day and 
night. He introduced the Eastern mode of responsive singing. 
He had with him two great souls, Monica and her son Augus- 
tine, just saved from his shameful vices. At last the empress 
yielded ; the bishop had more power in Milan than any one 
else. His maxim was, "The emperor is in the Church, 
not over it." 

Theodosius came to Milan, and entered the cathedral to 
give thanks for his victory over Maximus, and for the unity of 
the empire. He stood, as emperors were accustomed to do in 
the East, within the railings which separated the clergy from 
the people. Ambrose let him know that he had no right 
there, for "purple might make an emperor, but it could not 
make a priest." In an admirable temper Theodosius with- 
drew, thanked the bishop, and thought it a good rule to estab- 
lish in the Eastern Churches. Not so praiseworthy was 
Ambrose when certain Christians had burnt a Jewish syna- 
gogue, and Theodosius ordered it to be rebuilt by the bishop 
who had commanded the deed. He lost his manliness for 
once, and caused the order to be revoked. 

The circus and horse-race gave vast trouble to the pastors 
in the cities. At Thessalonica a favorite charioteer was thrown 
into prison for an infamous crime. The people demanded his 

*See notes to this chapter on Hymnology and Liturgy. 



PENANCE OF THEODOSIUS. IO9 

release. The military governor refused. The mob rose, slew 
him and his guards, and reigned supreme. Theodosius was 
angry enough to conceal his wrath. He sent his orders. The 
people were invited to games in the circus, where the soldiers 
were let loose upon them, and for three hours the innocent 
were slain with the guilty. Seven thousand people were butch- 
ered. Ambrose was so distressed that he could not bear to see 
his emperor's face. He retired into the country, and wrote to 
him, reproving him, and advising him not to appear at the 
sacred altar. But, on Sunday, he met Theodosius at the door 
of the church, took hold of his robe, and publicly said, "How 
darest thou to lift to God the hands which drip with blood? 
How take in them the holy body of the Lord? Get thee 
away ; if like David thou hast sinned, like David repent. Sub- 
mit to discipline." The emperor submitted. For eight months 
he did penance. At Christmas he wept in his palace, saying, 
"The house of God is open to beggars and slaves; to me it 
is closed, and so is the gate of heaven." Indulgence was 
granted him, and he publicly made his confession. But he was 
not restored to the Church until he enacted this law : That no 
sentence of death should ever be executed until thirty days 
after it was pronounced. 

"I have found the first man who dares to tell me the 
truth," said Theodosius, when happier days came, "and I 
know only one man who is worthy to be a bishop ; you will 
find him at Milan." In 395 he died in the arms of Ambrose. 
Two years later all Milan was in sadness; the good bishop was 
dying at the age of fifty-seven. Men forgot his faults, loved 
him for his ceaseless love to them, and honored him for his 
severity towards all wickedness. "Pray for him," said Stilicho, 
the military defender of Europe; "Italy and Christendom can 
not afford to lose him." Even Jews and pagans lamented 
his death. 

We may take Ambrose to represent the power of the clergy 
on the side of humanity and civilization. Skeptics and Chris- 
tian censors will not let us forget that many bishops admitted 
the world into their own hearts, and brought enormous evils 
into the Church. We do not ignore their sad influence. They 
made the Church worse than the apostles left it, but they did 
not make general society worse than the apostles had found it. 



110 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Strife, intolerance, opposition to human progress, had been in 
the world long before any Christian clergy existed. Did a 
Christian emperor, with a bishop at his ear, banish Cicero or 
kill Seneca? Did a clerical council take the life of Socrates? 
Was Pliny more humane than Ambrose ? If the spirit of per- 
secution came from any source outside of the human heart it 
came from paganism. The clergy, as a body, brought into 
society a gentler spirit, purer manners, happier customs, better 
laws, a higher regard for human life, and a compassion for 
human sorrows. When pagan lawyers and judges cared little 
for justice or mercy towards those who sought their rights and 
privileges, a bishop ventured to intercede and arbitrate between 
parties. Such men as Ambrose and Augustine saved many a 
poor sheep from the rough shears of the Roman courts. They 
raised the standard of equity. They taught the equality of all 
men before God and the law. "I venerate Christ in the slave 
who cleans my sandals," said Paulinus. They became interces- 
sors for the oppressed and dependent, and still later they were 
judges in the towns of the West. They had the oversight of 
the public morals. Husbands must not divorce their wives 
upon a whim. Parents must take care of their children. Cred- 
itors and debtors must be honest. The gambler learned that 
there was a law for him. At a later time "the bishops were 
charged with an oversight of prisoners, lunatics, minors, found- 
lings, and other helpless persons." Ambrose sold the plate of 
his church to redeem captives. They taught loyalty towards 
their .rulers,, and prayed that the emperor might have a long 
life, a secure realm, a safe home, valiant armies, a faithful sen- 
ate, a righteous people, and a world at peace. 



NOTES. 

I. Hymnology. To the psalms of David and Scripture paraphrases were 
gradually added hymns and anthems in the Church services. Chrysostom 
favored such chants as the "Gloria in Excelsis." Ambrose probably 
arranged the "Te Deum Laudamus" from a Greek anthem. In the East 
the finest early hymns came from Ephraem Syrus and Anatolius (451). In 
the West, Hilary, of Poitiers, (350) struck the note of Latin song, and was 
followed by Ambrose, Augustine, Damasus, Sedulius, Prudentius, and Fortu- 
natus (600). Great revivals have always brought a fresh growth of spiritual 



NOTES TO CHAPTER VI. Ill 

hymns; e. g., the times of St. Bernard 1130, Luther and Xavier 1540, the 
Wesleys 1760, and the many religious poets of our century. 

II. The word Liturgy at first meant the public service of worship, 
whether oral or written. Each minister had his own order, or form, but no 
written order of service can be traced with certainty beyond the time of 
Basil, and even then no minister was confined to written prayers and forms 
of administering the sacraments. The first written liturgies were very sim- 
ple. After the fifth century they were gradually amplified, but no one was 
enjoined upon the whole Church. The earliest seem to have been those of 
Antioch, Basil, Chrysostom, Alexandria, Rome, Milan, Gaul, and Spain. 
One long effort of the Roman popes was to secure a uniform ritual in 
the West. 

III. Monasticism in the Church was probably not borrowed from the 
Jewish monks nor pagan hermits. In its history were various stages of 
growth. 1. Asceticism in persons who thought the body was the chief seat 
of sin, and gave themselves to rigid self-denial, self-punishment, and self- 
imposed duties, such as unusual fasting, poverty, loneliness, and religious 
devotions. They, did not retreat from all society, but were the more silent, 
gloomy, and often censorious members of it. 2. Hermitry, which first 
appeared in Egypt and Syria. The hermit (eremite, anchoret, monk) was 
the man of the desert, living alone in his cell or cave, making a virtue of 
his shabby dress, coarse fare, meditations, and afflictions. Paul, of Thebes, 
and Anthony (250-350) set the example for thousands of hermits who filled 
the deserted cities and lands of the Nile. Rich men gave their wealth to 
the poor, put on a sheepskin, and lived on herbs. Some of them were studi- 
ous, learned, pious men; too many were crazy zealots. Persecution drove 
many to the deserts. Among the most fanatical hermits were the "pillar- 
saints," the imitators of Simeon the Stylite (see Chapter VII). 3. Convent- 
ism, cenobitism, or cloister-life. Several monks lived together in one house 
and formed a society. As women could not well be hermits, they dwelt 
together. Pachomius founded this sort of monachism, or celibate commu- 
nism, about 325, on an island of the Upper Nile, when he brought monks 
together on a self-supporting plan. They had precise rules for religious 
exercises and labors. They made boats and baskets, wove mats and cover- 
lets, cleared lands and made gardens. The monastery became a farm- 
house, workshop, church, school, and hospital. The system bred corruption. 
4. Monastic education and scholarship. These were promoted by the rules 
of Basil the Great and Jerome, whose learning was his chief virtue, while 
he gloried in being a monk. In a book written by Chrysostom the best 
side of monasticism is presented. Jerome roused a strong opposition to the 
system, for at Bethlehem he often turned from his library and his Biblical 
studies to honor the relics of martyrs. Vigilantius came from Gaul to visit 
him, heard him preach, clapped his hands and shouted: "Orthodox." But 
the Western man was disgusted at his relics and tapers, and went home to 
write against the evils which had crept into celibate and monastic life. The 
two men had a fierce controversy, in which Jerome lost his temper and 
the respect of many of his friends. Vigilantius is claimed by some writers 



112 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

as one of the fathers of the Waldenses. Other opponents of "this mighty 
movement of the age" were Aerius, Helvidius, and Jovinian. The latter 
denied the meritorious virtues ascribed to fasting, mortifications, and celib- 
acy. 5. The Benedictine System in Europe (see Chapter VIII). 

IV. The earliest Church historians whose writings are fully preserved. 
The Greek were Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (270-340), "the father of 
Church history," a moderate Nicenist and court-theologian. In two of his 
various works he sought to refute the heathen religions. His Evangelical 
Preparation and Demonstration are valuable apologies. He wrote also upon 
Biblical introduction. Socrates and Sozomen were lawyers at Constanti- 
nople (380-440). Theodoret was bishop of Cyrus in Syria (420-457), and 
not only rooted heresies out of his diocese, but devoted his income to build- 
ing bridges, baths, hospitals, and to the arts of civilization. He is distin- 
guished as a historian, commentator, and theologian. As the friend of 
Nestorius, and the advocate of fair dealing, he suffered from the violence of 
opposing factions. But not one of his own clergy appeared before a secular 
tribunal while he was bishop. Evagrius was a lawyer at Antioch. He 
continued the line of Greek histories to 594, and was very superstitious as well 
as orthodox. The early Latin historians were Rufinus of Italy (330-410); 
Cassiodorus, an adviser of Theodoric the Goth, and a monk (died about 
562) ; Sulpitius Severus in Gaul (died 420) ; and Paul Orosius, of Spain, who 
attempted a universal history down to his time in the fifth century. More 
valuable are the Letters of Augustine and his "City of God." 

V. Ancient Creeds. Naturally doctrines were formulated for purposes 
of instruction, definition, avowal, unity, and defense. From the time of 
Irenasus, who left us the first quite scientific rule of faith, on through two 
centuries, there was much freedom in the construction and uses of doctrinal 
formulas, every prominent church, or every province, having one of its own. 
More than thirty of these, slightly varying, are on record. Three ancient 
creeds are regarded as oecumenical : 

1. The so-called Apostles' Creed. It was not an apostolic gift, but a 
gradual formation (see p. 59), and was completed about 650 in the Latin 
Church. The form given by Rufinus, 390, is the first to bear the phrase: 
"He descended into hell" {ad infema), although Bishop Alexander, of 
Alexandria, before 326, wrote that Christ's soul "was banished ad in- 
feros, ... He did not descend into hades in his body, but in his spirit." 

(Ante-Nicene Lib., vol. xiv, p. 357.) Dr. Schaff says of this brief creed: 
" It has the fragrance of antiquity and the inestimable weight of universal con- 
sent. It is a bond of union between all ages and sections of Christendom." 

2. The Nicene Creed, 325, revised in 381 at Constantinople; the only 
one of the three put forth by a general council, and required to be sub- 
scribed by the clergy. (See pp. jy, 78, 101.) 

3. The so-called Athanasian Creed, framed probably in the fifth century 
in the West. It was never adopted by the Eastern Church. It seems to be 
the product of a deep thinker, in some Gallic convent, who freely took the 
weightiest ores of his own meditations, and by one quick process, like that 
of making Bessemer steel, drew forth his logical statements of the catholic 



NOTES TO CHAPTER VI. H3 

faith. Its "damnatory clauses, especially when sung or chanted in public 
worship, grate harshly on modern Protestant ears," but it ranks high among 
the attempts to define the mystery of the Trinity. 

These three symbols marked the first period of creed-formations. They 
passed through the Middle Ages into the next creed-period, the sixteenth 
V.entury, when they were reaffirmed by the Romanists and by evangelical 
Protestants. They do not positively express all saving truths. They give 
no outline of the moral nature of man. They assume, rather than affirm, 
the doctrines of sin, repentance, faith, regeneration, justification, and godli- 
ness. They do not assert all the practical doctrines believed and taught by 
the early Church. 

The Bible gave to the Church her belief on all the religious subjects of 
her thought; the belief gave the creed, or the deposit of faith in crystalline 
forms; and the creed became the basis of systematic theology. The early 
Church left us no well constructed theological science or system, but the 
doctrinal symbols were a foundation for it. Augustine expounded the 
Apostles' Creed ; on it Calvin reared the Institutes. The difference between 
a creed and a scientific theology is very marked in history. One taught 
essentials, the other built systems. One affirmed, the other proved. One 
was limited to certain doctrines, the other took free range in the world of 
truths. One was a fence, the other a field. One was a finished thought, 
the other an endless study. One was a watchword, the other a literature. 
One was intended to be a settlement of doctrine, the other was long a pro- 
gressive science. # 

"There is a development in the history of symbols. They assume a 
more definite shape with the progress of Biblical and theological knowledge. 
They are mile-stones and finger-boards in the history of Christian doctrine. 
They embody the faith of generations, and the most valuable results of 
religious controversies. They still shape and regulate the theological think- 
ing and public teaching of the Churches of Christendom. They keep alive 
sectarian strifes and antagonisms, but they reveal also the underlying agree- 
ment, and foreshadow the possibility of future harmony." (Schaff, Creeds 
of Christendom, i, p. 4.) 

VI. Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. The early Fathers "teach us 
that Inspiration is an operation of the Holy Spirit acting through men, 
according to the laws of their constitution, which is not neutralized by His 
influence, but adopted as a vehicle for the full expression of the divine 
Message. . . . They teach us that Christ — the Word of God — speaks 
from first to last ; tha # t all Scripture is permanently fitted for our instruction ; 
that a true spiritual meaning, eternal and absolute, lies beneath historical 
and ceremonial and moral details." (Westcott, Introduction to the Study 
of the Gospels, p. 449.) 

8 




1 M ^ £ M U 

X 2 * C rt tcJJ 
" <*- g« O -a . _ ^ 

^ -^ do « rf C 

c/T— d «» 2 ^ g 

•C 3 u S O g C 



a 

o 

<D ON « 

SI 8 






$3 O 



< 

OS 

w 

2 

w 

oftO 

si I 

o 
o 
w 

03 



.& o 



I a, 



t¥^. 



^-a^ i5 * z 

- o " g oT D 

c o^u-p< 

W ^ « n „£» 2 

a *ssi~ 

Q UUWhJ 

5 

h 



>- 

PQ 



CO 

Oh 
O 




o 





I T3 

o o 

O to 



2 cm 



. o 
3 a. 



1 



c 
o 

w 
u 
V 

i N*-o'iT s 

I J3 O t " H 
S ^ C fl.3 S 

5 * .2 -2 & * 

w O «12 a 
<u o o g « 

ft 3 »♦* g* C 

O <i O Xn •-* 
*5i . . •'i 



3 



^ 



§ « ftft-S £a - 

g <J OH fi ,Q •- ,0 

O. o ti (« (- «<u M 

„ h S> o ^ C o 



U -H » O fl 
!< O fl (j 

o c •- w.2 
*%£ So o 

<U C t/5 X t/> 



<u ° w cu.t! +3 S 

a S S 2 -9 2 o 

S-5 5 § 8 s « 

""Ph 



« 3 ■ ■ 



pq 



E 
© 

O "S 

5 8 

Z. ns 

< a 

0) 

O «& 



< 



S e.s 

w C oj 
3 ° co 

? ^ ^ 

P-i i — ,co 



•X 'S "-> 



iri43 



in 

oo 



■3 «3 

s x o « 

O TO cj TO 

~" ^ s •« 

< g to ^Sjg.w^a t 

•£2^.!^ n w ^ ^ 3 

. . TO >- <U <U 
CD 



C (-1 -4- 



B « 4 • 

CO 



ex 



OOflJf^^j^crt^- 
WW.™.... "^ f "" 









C 3 r "\ e Xi !/i 

^^J g U « o 
C G X! C ^ 3 

h h A> fe cc co U P4 Q 



&§ S8 

IMC c w 

C ^ TO W 

P C^ « 

O TO 



GO 

O 

cr: 

w 



Il6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



Chapter VII. 

FIVE GREAT CONTROVERSIES. 

400-451. 

I. War on Origen and Chrysostom. 

Was Origen a heretic ? This was the question one hundred 
and forty years after his death. It set the whole country, from 
the Nile to the Bosphorus, in a flame of personal controversy, 
and led to the banishment of the most princely preacher in the 
Greek Church. It brought out some zeal for the true faith, 
but more bigotry and wrath. Touching it lightly, we employ 
it as a mere base-line from which to survey the field and notice 
the chief men in it. Three parties arose: I. Independent stu- 
dents of Origen's writings, like Chrysostom, who took what was 
valuable, and cared little for his speculations. 2. Blind follow- 
ers who laid great stress on his erratic views; such were the 
monks in the Nitrian deserts up the Nile, four of whom were 
very tall and very learned. 3. Bitter opponents of almost every 
body who did not condemn Origen. 

The leader in "the crusade against the bones of Origen" 
was Epiphanius, bishop in Cyprus (367), an honest, well-mean- 
ing man, whom one calls "a type of primitive piety," and 
another, "a violent, coarse, contracted, and bigoted monastic 
saint, the patriarch of heresy-hunters." His chief work is the 
Panarium, or medicine-chest, containing antidotes for eighty 
heresies, among which are Barbarism, Platonism, and Scribism. 
In this learned volume he branded Origen as the father of 
Arianism and various other errors. He traveled widely in order 
to dispense freely his medicines. At Jerusalem, as he passed 
along the streets, mothers brought out their children to receive 
his blessing, and people crowded about him to kiss his feet and 
touch the hem of his garment. They needed an antidote to 
the heresy of superstition. Wiser people laughed at his blus- 
tering sermon, in which he demanded the condemnation of 



JEROME— THE TALL BROTHERS. 117 

Origen. The monk, Rufinus, and bishop John, of that city, set 
up a defense. They expected Jerome to stand on their side. 

Jerome (340-419) was a Dalmatian by birth, highly edu- 
cated in the classics at Rome, and a traveler in many lands. 
In Syria he entered a convent to mortify his sinful passions. 
As one means to this end he began the study of Hebrew; and 
he mastered the language, but not his strong temper, nor his 
pride. He afterwards boasted that he was "a philosopher, a 
rhetorician, a grammarian, a logician, a Hebrew, a Greek, a 
Latin — three-tongued." He became more than that — a com- 
mentator, and "the lion of Christian polemics." From him 
came the Latin Vulgate, the version of the Bible in use for 
centuries. But before his vast labors were thus far advanced 
he was at Rome, expounding Scripture, and lauding monasti- 
cism. The clergy, except Bishop Damasus, disliked him. He 
rebuked their luxury, despised their ignorance, and provoked 
their jealousy by praising the monastic life. He sought to 
persuade wealthy Christians to enter convents. He was an 
oracle with many devout and noble women, who received a 
taste for learning. Among them were the rich widow, Paula, 
and her daughters, one of whom gave herself to extreme fast- 
ing, and soon died. The Romans thought it a case of religious 
suicide. They blamed Jerome, saying that ' ' the accursed race 
of monks should be banished, stoned, or drowned;" and he 
went back to his convent at Bethlehem. He had once revered 
Origen as the greatest Church teacher after the apostles. But 
now, when Epiphanius was so near at hand, he dared not risk 
his own fame for orthodoxy. He opposed Rufinus, broke off 
fellowship with Bishop John, and plunged into one of the most 
disgraceful literary quarrels in all history. Rufinus went to 
Italy, and translated certain works of Origen into Latin, giving 
them a sounder tone. He was condemned for heresy, a word 
easily pronounced in those days. 

A third chieftain entered the lists. Bishop Theophilus, the 
image-breaker at Alexandria, had all the worst traits, but none 
of the virtues, of honest Epiphanius. The city was not large 
enough for his quarrels. The Scetic monks, up the Nile, 
forced him to anathematize Origen. The Nitrian monks turned 
upon him, and the "four tall -brothers " in his service refused 
to intrust him with benevolent funds. His troops scoured the 



Il8 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Nitrian desert, and drove the monks out of Egypt. The "tall 
brothers " led fifty of them to Constantinople, where John 
Chrysostom gave them a welcome, rather from charity than any 
zeal in the controversy. His kindness was his doom. 

The fiery controversies of the time showed one great need ; 
that was an ethical spirit. Theology had become intellectual, 
polemic, speculative. In trying to save it, many of its advo- 
cates were not earnest to save souls. The Church, especially 
in the East, was losing her grip on morality. Many of her 
peculiarities there find explanation in the intensity of the Greek 
nature. Her people did nothing by halves. They went into 
every thing with heated feeling. They loved the Church ; they 
loved the world : a flaming zeal for the one might compensate 
for a keen devotion to the other. If there were extremes in 
religion and secularity they would enjoy the raptures of both, 
and conscience scarcely gave them trouble. In worship they 
were ardent ; in amusements, fervid ; now clapping hands at a 
sermon, next shouting lustily at a horse-race. The same eyes 
dropped tears with equal facility at the altar and the theater. 
Lips that recited the Nicene Creed were pressed to the wine- 
cup at a festival. And still faith was intense — such brain-faith 
as it was — and the questions which were to come before the 
next council were the talk of the market, the baths, the tav- 
erns, the forum. No doubt there were pastors and people 
whose faith worked by love, and produced a serene and tem- 
perate morality. But they hardly got into history, which gives 
the storm-record, rather than the quieter scenes of the voyage. 

Two men raised their voices to call back the Church to 
morality, charity, and love of souls. One was Augustine in 
the West, telling men what sin is, and what human nature 
needs. The other was Chrysostom in the East, trying to re- 
store the ethics of Christianity. Both had most admirable 
mothers. Both were strongly tempted by pagan philosophies 
and by heresies. Both were likely to be drawn into the pro- 
fession of rhetoric ; one almost wrecked on the barren strands 
of vice ; the other recoiled from the licentiousness which pol- 
luted the cities. Chrysostom is now before us — a man famous 
for his pure life, his eminence as the first really great orator of 
the Greek pulpit, his union of Christian theology and ethics, 
his rich expositions of Scripture, his freedom from episcopal 



JOHN CHRYSOSTOM. II9 

pride, his pastoral care, and his missionary zeal at a time the 
Greek Church showed little benevolence to the heathen world. 
John of the Golden Mouth was born in 347, at Antioch. 
The piety and good sense of his mother, Anthusa, led the 
pagan philosopher Libanius to say, ' ' What wonderful women 
these Christians have!" * He found John's mind so well stored 
with Holy Scripture that he could not persuade him into hea- 
thenism, while imparting to the lad a good degree of classic 
culture. When this rhetorician was asked whom he wished for 
his successor he said, "John, if the Christians had not carried 
him away." The tears of his widowed mother kept John out 
of a monastery so long as she lived. He studied with Bishop 
Meletius, and became a public reader in the Church. A bish- 
opric was offered him ; but he put forward his friend Basil, the 
Cappadocian, who protested against the evasion. He entered 
a convent near Antioch, studied there six happy years, under- 
mined his health, returned to the city, became a presbyter, and 
the pastor of one of its Churches. There for sixteen years his 
eloquence, his boldness in attacking sins of every sort, and his 
clear expositions of Scripture, drew vast crowds to hear him. 
He represents the school of Antioch in rejecting the allegorical, 
mystical sense of the Divine Word, and in adhering to the 
plain, historical, spiritual meaning. He is the type of practical 
preachers and reformers, warning men of the pestilence of sin, 
eager to draw them out of their ruinous vices, and not failing 
to set before them the only remedy. His most successful 



* Julian had complained of the influence of Christian women, saying "that 
they were permitted by their husbands to take any thing out of their houses 
and bestow it upon the Galileans, or upon the poor, while they would not ex- 
pend the smallest trifle on the worship of the gods." He sent a governor to 
Antioch with orders to set up paganism ; but the women were too strong for the 
philosophers and priests. Libanius reported the causes of the failure to Julian, 
saying, "When the men are out of doors they obey your best advice, and come 
to the altars ; but when they get home their minds undergo a change ; they are 
wrought upon by the tears and entreaties of their wives, and they come no more 
to the altars of the gods." Wise women ! they knew what paganism would 
make of their husbands and sons. We have not space for the mention of many 
names which we had noted, but that of Flacilla is one of the noblest. Libanius 
must have hoped that she would restrain the wrath of her husband, Theodosius, 
against the images and temples. She often reminded him that God had raised 
him to his throne, and he should rule in justice and mercy. Empress as she 
was, she was simple in her Christian life, visiting the hospitals, administering 
food and medicines, and dressing wounds with her own hands. 



T20 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

labors were at Antioch, where about one hundred thousand 
Christians rejoiced in the healing of their schisms. 

One day the governor took him outside the walls to visit a 
martery. A coach was driven up ; he was put into it, and 
whirled away to the first station on the road to the capital. 
There he found that he was in the hands of men who were 
resolved to secure him as the Patriarch of Constantinople. He 
submitted, and was ordained. He began his reforms. He had 
his quarters in the episcopal palace, where his predecessor had 
lived in splendor. All its ornaments, carpets, curtains, finery, 
and some statues intended for the Church, went to the auc- 
tioneer. He lived as a plain monk. The clergy must live as 
celibates, quit idleness and feasting, dress more simply, and go 
to work earnestly, or be dismissed. Gay widows must draw 
less from the treasury, and lazier men must live by work. So 
generous was he to the really poor and suffering that he won 
the title of "John the Almoner." He rebuked the displays 
of riches and dress in church. "Oh, the tyranny of money," 
said he, "when it drives so many of the flock from the fold." 
The people saw that he had brought to the capital all his eth- 
ical zeal. Every-day life and heavenly truth were feeders of 
the stream of eloquence which poured through his lips. To 
him the most common things are symbols of the life everlast- 
ing. An event of the day, news from the court or the army, 
the arrival of a ship -load of corn, a sudden change in the 
fashions, are all brought into the spiritual service. He scathes 
the respectable sins. He learns that many people who were at 
church one day were at the circus the day after. And they 
know what to expect ; for he has warned them of suspension 
from the communion if they persist in the pestilent vices of 
the race -course and theater. But his heart is sad; he brings 
an aged rural bishop into his pulpit; they noisily protest, and 
the old man smiles and gives way ; John rises, takes up some 
of their social follies, and when he hits the hardest they clap 
their hands the loudest, until he tells them how the chariot 
yesterday cut to pieces a young man about to be married, and 
.that for such a youth God spared not his own son; and this 
fickle people must now sit down and think of the Redeemer 
weeping over a deaf city, and dying as its rejected Christ. 

No doubt Chrysostom was too often rash, hasty, arbitrary, 



SYNOD OF THE OAK. 121 

and severe. He lacked administrative wisdom. In his frank 
and confiding nature he was often unguarded in his words, and 
deceived by men of jealousy and intrigue. He had high no- 
tions of episcopal authority. As patriarch, he sought to reform 
the clergy and purify the pulpits of Asia Minor. He held 
synods, and degraded worldly bishops. The worse the clergy 
the louder the cry against him. But the great majority of the 
bishops seem to have stood by him. From Alexandria came 
the resistless opposition. Her bishop, Theophilus, had three 
objects in view : to condemn Origen, though this was really a 
pretense ; to chastise the escaped monks, whom Chrysostom 
had tried to reconcile to him, and now scarcely protected ; and 
to depress a rival patriarch. This last was the chief desire. To 
do this he set all his forces in motion. Epiphanius went to 
Constantinople in the Winter of 402, refused to hold fellowship 
with the patriarch and his clergy, dealt out his antidotes to 
Origenism as far as he was able, but was not allowed to publish 
his anathema against the Tall Brothers from the pulpit. Say- 
ing to some bishops at the harbor, "I leave to you the city, 
the palace, and hypocrisy," he took ship, and died on his way 
home. Then came the cunning Theophilus. He gained the 
Empress Eudoxia,* who gave him a palace in which to weave 
his nets. He disdained to accept the hospitalities of Chrysos- 
tom, and to have any conference with him. He listened to 
slanderers, and framed his twenty-nine charges, such as these : 
that Chrysostom was too much of a monk ; that he ate by him- 
self; that he abused the clergy; that he called Epiphanius a 
fool and the empress a Jezebel. Origenism was dropped, and 
the Tall Brothers conciliated. 

Theophilus packed a council to suit himself. It met secretly 
at The Oak, a church near Chalcedon, in a diocese where he 
had no sort of jurisdiction. Nor had most of the thirty bishops 
who sat in it ; for they came chiefly from Egypt and Syria. 
They summoned Chrysostom. He declined to appear, and 
forty bishops were with him in his own city, sustaining him ! 
His reply was: "Theophilus and his allies have no right to sit 
in the council. Invite all the bishops of Christendom, and I 
will appear; until then I will not go, though summoned ten 

* Eudoxia, young and beautiful, despised her husband, Arcadius, and led a 
licentious life. 



122 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

thousand times." His messengers were outraged, and "The 
Holy Synod of the Oak " deposed him on false charges of un- 
churchly conduct and treason, and decreed his banishment. 
The Emperor Arcadius indorsed the sentence. His people 
rose to defend him, but he was intent upon obeying. They 
guarded his doors to prevent his escape ; but he slipped away, 
and a vessel landed him on the eastern shore. Theophilus en- 
tered the city, with his imported monks and sailors, to possess 
the churches. But the sad and sullen people fell upon them, 
slaying the boldest, and he narrowly escaped. Sailing home, 
he declined to attend the next council on the plea that his 
devoted, people could not spare him. 

On the third night after the sentence a well-timed earth- 
quake shook the city. Eudoxia was terrified. She sent a 
messenger to bring back Chrysostom. The Bosphorus was 
alive with people to receive him. They carried him into his 
church, and compelled him to speak. "Blessed be the Lord," 
said he. ' ' I gave thanks when expelled ; I give thanks when 
returned. . . . O noble flock ! In the absence of the shep- 
herd ye have routed the wolves." Sixty bishops annulled the 
decrees of The Oak. Two months later the empress set up 
her statue in front of his church, and dedicated it with pagan 
ceremonies, adoring the image of the emperor. Chrysostom 
denounced the heathen revels. On the day of John the Baptist 
he began his sermon thus: "Again Herodias rages, and dances, 
and demands the head of John." The empress took it to her- 
self, and raged furiously. At Easter, when hundreds were to 
be admitted to Church membership, and thousands were keep- 
ing vigils, troops of soldiers committed a horrible slaughter in 
the cathedral. For days the clergy were hunted down, and the 
"Johnites" were cast into prison, to compel the bishops to 
meet and anathematize John., After two weary months a little 
packed synod deposed him. Again he stole away from his watch- 
ful friends, and, as the chronicler says, ' ' the angel of the Church 
went with him." He was sent, in 404, to Cucusus, a hamlet in 
the wilds of Armenia. Even there were monks, nuns, and a 
pastor to befriend him. His flock sent him every sort of sup- 
plies. But in his third year of banishment he was exiled to a 
more desert place, and on the way to it he died, at sixty-three 
years of age, saying, "Glory to God for all things!" 



SCHOOLS OF THE EAST. 



23 



Chrysostom had long been active in aiding missions among 
the Goths, Phoenicians, and Persians. Wealthy friends, espe- 
cially ladies, supplied the funds. In his exile he had a vast 
influence by his letters. One great bishop, Innocent of Rome, 
nobly exerted himself for John and the " Johnites, " who were 
treated as schismatics for ten years. The West was likely to 
withdraw her fellowship from the East. Prelatic tyranny began 
to change its tone. Antioch led the way in acknowledging 
the orthodoxy and innocence of Chrysostom. On that simple 
act of justice seemed to depend the unity of Christendom. 
His name was restored to the Church registers. His remains 
were brought from the grave, where they had lain twenty-seven 
years ; and when that sacred dust was placed near the altar, 
where it had once been so eloquent, the schism was healed. 
The voice was hushed ; the life of the man was an enduring 
plea for liberty. 

II. Christological Controversies. 

The schools of the East gave rise to other controversies. 
The doctrine of the Trinity being settled, the next questions 
would properly refer to the two natures in Christ. How were 
the Logos and the humanity related in Jesus? There had 
long been two drifts of thought. The Alexandrian school had 
tended to lose the human in the divine. The school of Antioch 
tended to a distinct separation of the two natures. Hence 
arose the Christological controversies which agitated the Greek 
Church for more than two hundred years with extraordinary 
violence. In the process of stating and maintaining her own 
belief, the Church threw aside various doctrines which may be 
reduced to three leading types: The Apollinarian, which left ^ 

Christ's human nature incomplete, so that he would not be 
perfect man ; the Nestorian, which was represented as attrib- 
uting to his human nature a personality — two natures, two 
persons ; and the Eutychian, or the absorption of the human 
nature in the divine — one person, one nature.* 



"•Before the Council of Chalcedon, which most clearly defined the Church 
doctrine, Vincent of Lerins, in Gaul, put it thus: "In God one substance 
(essence), but three persons; in Christ, two substances, but one person. In the 
Trinity there is a distinction of persons, but a unity of substance ; in the Savior, 
a distinction of substances, but a unity of person." 



124 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

I. The Apollinarians insisted that in Jesus the Logos took 
the place of a human spirit. In one of his kindlier moods 
Epiphanius wrote: "Some of our brethren, in high position 
and esteem, hold that our Lord Christ assumed flesh and soul 
{psyche), but not our spirit (pneumd), and, therefore, was not a 
perfect man. The aged and venerable Apollinaris, Bishop of La- 
odicea, dear even to the blessed Father Athanasius, and in fact 
to all the orthodox, has been the first to frame and spread this 
doctrine. When we first heard of it we could not credit it, 
thinking that his disciples had not understood the deep thoughts 
of so learned and discerning a man, or had fabricated it them- 
selves." In 362 an Alexandrian council rejected the doctrine, 
affirming that "Christ had a reasonable soul." Nearly ten 
years later Apollinaris, who was usually treated with tender- 
ness, seceded, and formed a sect of his own, which was often 
condemned by councils and severely persecuted, until some of 
its members returned to the catholic body, and others ran into 
Eutychianism. 

II. The Nestorians are represented as holding that each 
nature in Christ was personal ; thus the two natures would give 
a twofold personality. It seems clear that Nestorius did not 
mean to teach this doctrine. He was a Syrian monk, then a 
presbyter at Antioch, and, in 428, Patriarch of Constantinople. 
The people hoped for a second Chrysostom when he came; for 
lie was plain, frank, honest, eloquent, and impetuous. He was 
Chrysostom overdone, not having so much spiritual fervor, 
Scriptural knowledge, love, and humanity. He hated heresy 
more, but sin less. In his inaugural he said to Theodosius II : 
"Give me, O Emperor, the earth purified of heretics, and I 
will give thee heaven for it ! Aid me against the heretics, and 
I will help thee fight the Persians." But he failed to class 
himself among the authors of a heresy. The Arians burned 
down one of their churches rather than yield it to him. Other 
buildings fell, and he was called "the incendiary." The Pela- 
gians * were the only errorists whom he and the emperor 
spared. He now objected to the term, "Mother of God" 
(theotokos), which Origen had applied to Mary. It had come 



*The Pelagian controversy came between the Apollinarian and Nestorian, 
but was not Christological. Nestorius favored the Pelagian doctrine of Free- 
will, but not that of Original Sin. He gave shelter to several Pelagian leaders. 



CYRIL. 125 

into very common use, along with a growing devotion to her. 
Nobody meant to say that the eternal God was born of Mary 
in any absolute sense. He proposed the term, "Mother of 
Christ" (christotokos) ; for Christ was both God and man. A 
lawyer placarded him as a follower of Paul of Samosata. The 
monks, and most of the clergy of the city, were against him. 
Men contradicted him in the pulpit, insulted him in the street, 
threatened to fling him into the sea, and many forsook his 
church. He retaliated, and had the noisier monks whipped and 
cast into prison. Proclus, his chief opponent at home, honored 
Mary in a bombastic way as "the spiritual paradise of the 
second Adam, the workshop in which the two natures were 
annealed together, the bridal chamber in which the Word 
wedded the flesh," and much more too coarse for our pages, 
but proving that Mary was gaining undue reverence by this 
controversy. 

The leading antagonist, as in the war upon Chrysostom, 
was a bishop of Alexandria. He was Cyril, the nephew of 
Theophilus. He is painted by Dr. Schaffas "a learned, acute, 
energetic, but extremely passionate, haughty, ambitious, and 
disputatious prelate. Moved by interests both personal and 
doctrinal, he entered the field, and used every means to over- 
throw his rival in Constantinople. ... In him we have 
a striking proof that the value of a doctrine can not always 
be judged by the personal worth of its representatives. God 
uses for his purposes all sorts of instruments, good, bad, and 
indifferent."* But Cyril did one fair thing at the outset; he 
wrote to Nestorius. Finding no concessions would be made, 
he warned the whole Church against the new heresy, and ran 
into another which Eutyches drew to a head. 

A third CEcumenical Council was attempted in 431, at 
Ephesus. Both Nestorius and Cyril were there with their 
bishops and armed attendants. A deliberate fight with swords, 
in an open field, might have been more fair and honorable 



* The last brilliant lecturer on the Neoplatonic philosophy, at Alexandria, 
was Hypatia, "distinguished for her beauty, her intelligence, her learning, and 
her virtue, and esteemed both by Christians and by heathens. She was seized in 
the open street by the Christian populace and fanatical monks (415), perhaps 
not without the connivance of the violent Bishop Cyril, thrust out of her car- 
riage, dragged to the cathedral, completely stripped, barbarously murdered with 
shells before the altar, and then torn to pieces and burnt." (Schaff.) 



126 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

than those "mutual criminations, invectives, arts of Church 
diplomacy and politics, intrigues, and violence which give the 
saddest picture of the uncharitable and unspiritual Christianity 
of that time." The leaders were put under arrest by the im- 
perial force. Yet, in the -fires and the whirlwind there was at 
last a calm voice from the lips of the gentle Theodoret, the 
bishop of Cyrus, which affirmed the belief in one Christ, 
whose two natures are united without confusion ; and Mary was 
confessed to be the "Mother of God" because the Word was 
incarnate and born of her. The question of personality was 
evaded. Nothing was really settled except the deposition and 
retirement of Nestorius. His supporters being "satisfied with 
saving the doctrine of two natures, thought it best to sacrifice 
Nestorius to the unity of the Church " and condemn his inno- 
vations, for nothing less would quiet Cyril, who barely escaped 
deposition by the emperor. After four years' rest in his old 
convent, Nestorius was driven from one and another shelter to 
some remoter place of exile, and he died, no one knows when 
nor where. Every year the Monophysites of Upper Egypt 
cast stones on his supposed grave, and they say no rain ever 
falls upon it. The emperor caused all his writings to be burnt, 
and also those of Theodore, of Mopsuestia, the long-deceased 
teacher of Nestorius and the father of his error. 

The followers of Nestorius, expelled from the Roman Em- 
pire, found refuge in Persia, gained the Christians of that 
country, strengthened them under persecutions, had flourishing 
schools at Nisibis and Edessa, and spread to Arabia, India, and 
China. Thus a powerful body was lost to the Catholic Church. 
The story of Prester John, a king who became a presbyter and 
brought his people to the Christian faith in the eleventh 
century, connects them with Tartary. The ninety thousand 
Christians of St. Thomas, in India, are still Nestorians. The 
American Church has prosperous missions among the Nesto- 
rians of Persia. 

III. The Eutychians went to the other extreme, and virtually 
said, "one person, one nature." They took their name from 
Eutyches, an aged abbot at Constantinople, who merely brought 
to the front what Cyril had kept in reserve. The doctrine was 
that "there are not two natures in Christ after the incarnation, 
but one nature incarnate." It was virtually the deification of 



ANATOLIUS— LEO THE GREAT. 127 

the humanity of Christ. This party came to insist upon the 
language of a favorite hymn, in which were such terms as, 
"God was born, God was crucified." Eutyches was opposed 
by Flavian, patriarch of Constantinople, and his doctrine con- 
demned by a local synod in that city. Then help came from 
the same old quarter, Alexandria, and it was of the same old 
sort. Cyril had died in 444, and in his stead was Dioscurus, 
whose bad qualities exceeded those of his two nearest prede- 
cessors. It is painful to think that such a man ever made a 
page of Church history. The Patriarchates of the Nile and the 
Bosphorus were soon in a third war. 

An attempt was made to convene a general council, in 449, 
at Ephesus. The result was, "The Synod of Robbers," so 
many bishops were robbed of their titles and offices, so many 
human rights taken from men, and, worse still, Christ was 
denied his true humanity. Dioscurus presided, and soldiers 
forced the votes of bishops who sought to hide under the 
benches. The good Theodoret was excluded and deposed 
along with Flavian ; and the latter was so wounded by monks 
that he soon died. Of course, Eutyches was pronounced 
orthodox and a saint. The deacon, Anatolius, was elected 
patriarch of Constantinople, but he afterwards renounced the 
Eutychian doctrine. We can forgive him for having once 
yielded to Dioscurus, when we sing his hymn, — 

"Jesus, deliverer, come thou to me ; 
Soothe thou my voyaging over life's sea ; 
Thou, when the storm of death roars, sweeping by, 
Whisper, O Truth of Truth, 'Peace, it is I.'" 

It was the cry of one who was weary of the angry contro- 
versy about the Prince of Peace. Of all themes ever discussed, 
the one then in question requires calmness, reverence, charity, 
and a profound sense of that^ mystery which no human reason 
can explain. Theodoret said that these zealots for the phrases 
of a hymn acted as if "Christ had prescribed merely a system 
of doctrines, and had not given also rules of life." Fighting 
for a creed they forgot their Christianity. The notable thing 
is that they were erroneous in theology as well as in conduct. 

One man now stood forth at the head of a host to stay 
the advance of error, and save the Church from the Alexan- 
drian tyranny and theology. He was Leo the Great, Bishop of 



128 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Rome, from 440 to 461, superior to all the predecessors in his 
chair, and few greater ever came after him. With all his am- 
bition to increase the papal power, he represents a class of 
men who could contend earnestly for the faith without losing 
their personal religion. The age had scarcely a theologian 
equal to him. He was worthy to take up the pen which 
Augustine had recently dropped. He secured the calling of a 
general Council. The ravages of Attila* forbade a meeting in 
Italy. Nice was chosen, but it really met near there, at Chalce- 
don, in 45 1, the number of bishops being about six hundred, and 
they chiefly Oriental. The first sessions were stormy. When 
Theodoret entered his friends cheered him ; the other side 
shouted, ''Away with the Jew, the master of Nestorius, the 
blasphemer of Christ!" A retort was given, "Cast out Dios- 
curus! Who does not know his crimes?" Dioscurus was soon 
abandoned by his allies, put under guard, and deposed for 
avarice, injustice, and vices of licentiousness. Discipline must 
go along with doctrine. The most important result was the 
famous creed of Chalcedon, relative to ' ' the one and the same 
Christ, known in (of) two natures without confusion, without 
division — the distinction of the natures being in no wise abol- 
ished by their union." Ever since, this has been the catholic 
Christology. It was drawn from the letter of Leo, who ob- 
jected to only one decision of the Council, which was that 
the Patriarch of Constantinople was on an equality with him- 
self. Henceforth the rivalry was between the patriarchates 
of the Bosphorus and the Tiber. The emperor ordered the 
Eutychians to leave the empire, and their writings to be burnt. 
But their theories reappeared in new forms, equally unscrip- 
tural and more metaphysical, and condemned in two coun- 
cils at Constantinople (553 and. 680), which are often called 
general, f 

We are indebted to the Eastern part of the ancient Church 
for the CEcumenical creeds she left us — creeds still retained by 
Greek, Roman, and really Protestant Churches. Carrying that 
legacy with us we shall devote the coming pages of this book 
mainly to Christianity in the West. X The Eastern division 

* He lost the great battle of Chalons, 451. All the Western Empire was 
now threatened or tribulated by invaders. (See Chapter viii.) 

tNote II. J Note III. 



CHURCH IN THE WEST. 



I2 9 



of the Church was in an old world, beyond which she reached 
only the Slavonic nations ; in the development of Christian 
doctrine and life she almost ceased at Chalcedon : the Western 
had new peoples in Europe to Christianize, and her sons would 
have a new world to populate ; she has had a progress of her 
own, often slow and once long checked, but with a grand out- 
come at last. 

III. Controversy on Anthropology. 

The Church in the West gave rise to but one great contro- 
versy in the fourth century, and that pertained to Anthropology, 
or the doctrines concerning the nature of man, his sin, his 
ability, his freedom, and his salvation. Not only is there a 
change of subject and field, but we shall happily find a more 
calm spirit in the debates ; fire enough, yet not so much 
Church force, nor imperial power. In it there was more rea- 
sonable discussion ; the sword does not glitter, the pen wins its 
victories. We shall first notice Pelagius and his doctrines, and 
then Augustine and his system. 

Pelagius was born about 350, probably in Wales, or Brit- 
tany, his Celtic name being Morgan, or the sea-born. He was 
a monk, but never a preacher. Dr. Schaff says, ' ' He was a 
man of clear intellect, mild disposition, learned culture, and 
spotless character. Even Augustine, with all abhorrence of his 
doctrines, repeatedly speaks respectfully of the man." His 
personal morality may have led him to exalt human ability and 
merit. He studied the Greek theology, inclining to the school 
of Antioch. In 409 he was in Rome commenting upon Paul's 
epistles, and seeking to reform the corrupt morals of the 
clergy, with whom Jerome could do nothing. He won to 
Christianity the lawyer Celestius, who may have been a Scot. 
These two men were the complement of each other. The 
monk was the author of the moral part, the lawyer, the formu- 
lator of the mental part of the system. They viewed Chris- 
tianity on its ethical side. To escape the invading Goths* 



*To preserve unity of subjects the Germanic settlements in Western 
Europe, previous to 451, are reserved for treatment within the next period. 
Perhaps, if the Goths had not sent its founders from Rome, Pelagianism might 
have had a different development, or met with less resistance fiom Augustine 
and more success in the West of Europe. It ran the gauntlet between ortho- 

9 



130 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

they went over to Hippo, and had some friendly correspondence 
with its bishop, Augustine, then away at Carthage. Pelagius 
went to Palestine, where Jerome soon assailed him. One local 
synod was puzzled over him, and a larger one acquitted him of 
all heresy.* Certain monks were enraged at Jerome's fury, and 
rushing to Bethlehem broke into his monastery, beat the in- 
mates, set it on fire, and drove the aged scholar into an 
unfriendly world. 

Meanwhile Celestius requested the clergy of Carthage to 
ordain him a presbyter. This brought on the crisis. The ex- 
amination was not satisfactory. An accuser presented several 
errors drawn from his writings. The synod excommunicated 
him. He went to Ephesus and was ordained. In these affairs 
Augustine had taken no part, but he now, in a kindly spirit, 
wrote treatises against the new doctrines. 

The starting-point of these teachers was their maxim, "If 
I ought, I can;" obligation implies ability. They held that 
Adam was mortal before his fall ; that his sin affected only him- 
self; that newly born infants are in the same condition in 
which he was before he fell ; that every man can, if he will, 
obey God's commands, and maintain innocence, having all 
necessary ability and free-will ; that before Christ came there 
were some sinless men ; that God gives men grace in propor- 
tion to their merit ; that grace is synergetic ; and that men 
must be perfectly free from sin in order to be the sons of God. 
They also affirmed what then shocked many minds, that in- 
fants, dying unbaptized, are saved ; but they did not believe 
that the death of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit 
secured their salvation. 

Several synods in North Africa (416-418) condemned these 
doctrines, and protested against Bishop Zosimus, of Rome, for 
having declared that Pelagius and Celestius were orthodox ; a 
clear case against his infallibility. He now saw his error, and 
sent forth to all the bishops, East and West, a letter pronounc- 
ing an anathema upon the heretics. Whoever would not sign 

dox pens and Arian swords, for the Southern invaders were ignorant Arians. 
The time of war and woe was not favorable to it, for human nature disclosed 
its own inherent depravities. 

*He is said to have taken offense at the prayer of Augustine: "Give what 
Thou commandest, and command what thou wiliest." Thus far his doctrine 
was a reaction against Augustinianism. 



AUGUSTINE. 131 

it should be deposed, banished, and impoverished. (Bishops 
were now supposed to have property.) Eighteen bishops of 
Italy refused to subscribe, among whom was Julian, of Ecla- 
num, near Capua, ' ' the most learned, acute, and systematic of 
the Pelagians," and the strongest opponent of Augustine. He 
and other leaders fled to Constantinople, where Nestorius gave 
them a kind reception. Julian sacrificed all his property to 
relieve the poor in a famine, and probably became a school- 
master in Sicily, where he ended his days. Pelagius and Ce- 
lestius disappear from history. Their system never gathered a 
sect ; it simply formed a school of opinion. 

Augustine was born in 354, at Tagaste, a northern village 
in Numidia. His father, Patricius, was kind, high-tempered, 
sensual, and a pagan until near his death. Monica will never 
be forgotten for her zealous efforts to educate her son and save 
him from the vices into which he plunged. Her consecration 
of him to the Lord, her lessons, prayers, and entreaties, all 
seemed to be in vain for thirty years. The boy was given to 
play, if not pilfering; the student read the Latin poets with 
eagerness, and took holiday with strolling comedists or in the 
circus ; the young man of eighteen had his mistress, and was 
the father of a son ; and still that mother had faith that he 
would yet turn to Christ. In scarcely any other young man do 
we see such a conflict between heart and conscience, passion 
and principle, temptation and conviction. Leaving his wid- 
owed mother to care for his sister and brother, he went to Car- 
thage to learn eloquence and become a teacher of rhetoric. 
Now we see him winning a prize ; the walls ring with applauses. 
Again he is lounging with idlers of the park, or wild with 
delight in the theater. Now rioting in vice, again stupid in 
his meditations ; now flinging down his Cicero, because the 
name of Christ is not in it, and once more opening his Bible, 
but not finding there what he craves ; one hour saying, ' ' I 
have lied to my mother, and such a mother!" at another time 
praying, "Give me purity, but not now" — this was young 
Augustine. 

The Manicheans took him up, and for nine years held him in 
their sensual heresy. Monica was almost in despair of him, 
until a bishop, who had once been snared into that heresy, 
said to her, "It is not possible that the son of such tears 



132 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

should be lost." She saw him waste the earnings of his pro- 
fession ; she feared that he would die in some of his revels. She 
followed him to Rome and to Milan, and thither went some 
of his young students, who were now almost Christians. He 
listened to the sermons of Ambrose, who would sometimes say 
in public, "What a mother you have!" little knowing, wrote 
Augustine, "what a son she had, and what doubts were in his 
mind." At length the divine Word brought conviction. His 
will was turned, his heart renewed, his health seemed to be 
ruined, and he felt that he was a mere wreck washed up on the 
Rock of redeeming grace, saved himself, but with the loss of 
his physical powers. But soul and body were alike restored 
to vigor. 

On his return homeward, at the age of thirty-two, he and 
his mother were in a house at Ostia waiting for a ship. As 
they gazed from a window she said : ' ' My son, I am done with 
this world; it no longer delights me. What I have hoped and 
lived for is gained — your conversion. What then do I here?" 
Five days later she died, "and yet she was not altogether dead," 
wrote Augustine, who buried her, unconscious that he would be 
the eternal monument to her name, her motherly love, faith, 
wisdom, and persistent effort. One of his first contributions to 
the power of divine grace was his volume of "Confessions," 
almost the only autobiography which combines honesty with 
interest, self-exposure with the design to honor God, and grate- 
ful piety with popularity. "It is one of the devotional classics 
of all creeds." The key-note is struck in the words: "Thou 
hast made us for thyself, and the heart is restless till it rests in 
thee." We venture to put another sentence thus: 

I loved thee late, too late I loved thee, Lord ; 
Yet not so late but thou dost still afford 
The proof that thou wilt bear with winning art 
One sinner more upon thy loving heart; 
And may I prove, when all this life is past, 
Though late I loved I loved thee to the last. 

The prodigal son of the fourth century appears in the fifth 
as the simple child of God, the affectionate pastor, the popular 
preacher, the wise bishop, the eminent scholar, the prolific 
writer, the defender of the Church against heresies and schisms, 
the opposer of prelatic tyranny, the metaphysician, the philos- 



BISHOP OF HIPPO. 133 

opher, whose reasonings always start out from the maxim that 
faith precedes scientific knowledge, and the founder of a system 
of theology from whose base lines all other systems have ever 
since been measured. They are, or they are not, Augustinian. 
Having been elected presbyter against his will, he was, in 395, 
chosen bishop of Hippo, about two hundred miles west of 
Carthage. The kings who once reigned there limited their 
power to Numidia, and are forgotten. The bishop had vast 
influence in the whole Church of the West, and in that city he 
is still called "the great Christian." He was not quite a monk, 
and he once said that "he had nowhere found better men, and 
nowhere worse, than in monasteries." He lived with his clergy 
and students in .one house, had all things common, and sent 
from it ten men who became bishops. His simple rules gave 
rise to the Augustinian order of monks, to which Luther be- 
longed. The labors of his thirty-eight years as bishop seem 
enormous. He was like Basil and Ambrose in his devotion to 
all the humane and spiritual affairs of his people. To him many 
a troubled home owed the return of sunshine after a storm, and 
many a captive his release. "Am I not your pastor?" he 
would say in his pulpit as he broke into some extempore train 
of thought; "I do not wish to be be saved without you — all 
of you, my flock." 

Men who write for their time are not often read in the future. 
Augustine wrote for his age and to it. Yet his best writings 
became the study of later centuries. ' ' No important vessel has 
foundered of that large squadron which he committed to the 
stream of ages." We bring a volume of his admirable letters 
into port, and see how he bore himself towards the Donatists, 
who are sometimes put forward as the Protestants of that age. 
He offered the fairest terms of peace and union to the best of 
their clergy. He entreated them to repress the outrages of the 
Circumcelliones, saying: "These desperadoes laid ambush for 
our bishops on their journeys, abused our clergy with savage 
blows, and assaulted our laity in the most cruel manner, and 
set fire to their habitations. . . . These men are among 
your presbyters, keeping us in terror. . . . They live as 
robbers, they die as Circumcelliones, they are honored as mar- 
tyrs! Nay, I do injustice to robbers in this comparison, for 
robbers do not destroy the eyesight of those whom they have 



134 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

plundered. ... If you treat all our remonstrances with 
contempt, we shall never regret that we desired to act in a 
peaceful and orderly way." He had narrowly escaped these 
ruffians when they waylaid him. When he first favored the 
rigorous measures of the Emperor Honorius against this sect 
it was to repress the crimes, and even murders which they 
shielded, and not to persecute them for their religious errors. 
Many of the purer Donatists submitted and entered the Church 
catholic, and as the penal laws seemed to produce good results 
he began to say: "Compel them to come in." This text was 
still more grievously misused in later times. But the fanatics 
of this sect grew more lawless, and he more severe, although 
he opposed the infliction of death upon them. 

The Manicheans were not so openly at war upon civil soci- 
ety. They were worse heretics, but better citizens than many 
of the Donatists. To them Augustine wrote : ' ' Let those who 
do not know what it costs to find the truth burn against you ; 
but I must bear myself towards you with the same patience 
which my fellow-believers showed towards me while I was wan- 
dering in blind madness in your opinions." He knew their 
wretched theories and their secret sins. His experience was a 
source of power in all his arguments against them and the Pel- 
agians, for he had learned that sin was deeply rooted in the 
human soul, and that nothing but divine grace could eradicate it. 

Augustine met every leading tenet of Pelagius with an 
opposite doctrine. He affirmed God's absolute sovereignty in 
predestination, and in all the gifts that pertain to eternal life; 
the fall of the whole human race, generically, in Adam; the 
judicial transmission of original sin to all men; the depravity 
of all human powers in man; a condemnation of all infants dying 
unbaptized; justification by faith in Christ; sanctification by the 
Holy Ghost; unmerited and irresistible grace, without which 
free will can effect no spiritual good ; and the necessity for God 
to move and direct the human will in salvation. 

When nearly seventy-six years of age Augustine saw a new 
enemy overrunning his diocese. The Vandals had rushed out 
of that vast Gothland, which bred the destroyers of the Western 
Empire, crossed the Rhine (405), pillaged Gaul, and settled in 
Spain. A foolish empress, Placidia, had threatened to remove 
Governor Boniface from North Africa, and he had resisted, 



SEMI-PELAGIANISM. 1 35 

rebelled, and invited Genseric to come with his Vandals and 
defend him. Just then the empress saw her folly and recalled 
her orders. But it was too late. The Vandals were on the 
soil, supported by Moors, Donatists, and Circumcelliones. Bon- 
iface could not drive them back. They ravaged cities, villages, 
and churches, and shut him up in Hippo, where Augustine was 
wearing out his strength in providing for the bands of refugees 
within the walls. The dying bishop could not do better than 
point the Christian general to the penitential psalms, written 
upon the walls near his bed, and which he read over and over 
with tears. The Lord took his servant from the evil to 
come (430).* 

The city fell. It seems never to have had another bishop. 
Carthage fell at the stroke of these Arian Vandals, who subdued 
the whole country, ruled it, and caused scenes of terror to the 
catholics for nearly a century. The word Vandalism came into 
history. The orthodox Church made a noble record. Bishop 
Vigilius has been called another Athanasius, and Fulgentius, 
who was banished for a time with sixty bishops to Sardinia, 
was called the Augustine of the sixth century. In 534 the 
famous General Belisarius expelled the Vandals, and restored 
the African Church to peaceful times until the Mohammedans 
crushed it into the dust from which it never rose. Her first 
known father, Tertullian, had said that ' ' the blood of the mar- 
tyrs is seed," and her last great theologian and bishop saw the 
harvest-field in its widest extent and its richest wealth. Hence- 
forth it declined and perished, showing that the Church in 
certain localities has not always flourished under persecution, 
nor retained her life after the slaughter of her children. 

Semi - Pelagianism took a quite mature form from John 
Cassian, an Eastern monk of culture, devotion, and energy. 
He had studied with Jerome and Chrysostom, and in his old age 
he said: "What I have written John taught me, and it is not 



* Augustine wrote various works on theology, and in refutation of the 
Manicheans, Donatists, Arians, Pelagians, Semi-Pelagians, and Pagans. When 
Alaric, the Arian Goth, captured Rome, the pagans rallied and asserted that 
the calamities of the expiring empire were due to Christianity. He soon began 
his great apology — "The City of God" — and upon it spent much of thirteen 
years. In it he portrays the nature of paganism, and sets forth the place and 
power of God's eternal city, or kingdom, in this world. This work "has re- 
mained to this hour the standard philosophy of history for the Church orthodox." 



136 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

so much mine as his. For a brook rises from a spring ; from 
the teacher flows what is found in the pupil." John had urged 
repentance upon those gay people who had applauded his ser- 
mons and gone home to forget the ten commandments, or run 
to the circus ; and he meant to charge the responsibility upon 
them when he said: "You are what you make yourselves to 
be. You have the remedy in your own hands ; your wills are 
free; that iron will can make a way for your escape from sin." 
Cassian went into Southern Gaul about 412, and devoted him- 
self to founding monasteries, and framing a theology that 
would be adapted to monastic life. His rules were severe 
against "the eight capital vices — intemperance, unchastity, 
avarice, anger, sadness, dullness, ambition, and pride." At 
Marseilles he founded two large convents, one of which was for 
nuns, and soon it had some five thousand inmates. It was the 
model for many nunneries. Assuming to dislike dogmas, he 
formulated some of his own. He decidedly opposed the chief 
errors of Pelagius, with whom he had labored awhile in Italy; 
but thought that Augustine laid man too helpless at the foot 
of a Sovereign's throne. He held that all men sinned in Adam ; 
that all have hereditary and actual sins ; that all are naturally 
inclined to evil ; that all who are saved must be assisted by 
supernatural grace ; that grace develops the germs of virtue 
which God has put in man's nature ; that the human will, which 
is simply weakened by the fall, renders that grace effective ; 
that man is not spiritually dead, but sick, and can at least 
desire the aid of the physician, and either accept or reject it 
when it is offered ; that God saves while man co-operates, and 
that God calls, but man is elected only on condition of his 
faith. Predestination was explained as twofold; the general, 
by which God wills the salvation of all men, and the special, 
by which he determines to save all who, as foreseen, will be- 
lieve; hence Christ died alike for all men, and his grace is 
offered to all. Children dying in infancy are dealt with accord- 
ing to what God foresees they would become if they should 
live to mature years ; yet all baptized children seem to be 
placed among the saved. * 



* " Augustinianism asserts that man is morally dead; Semi-Pelagianism 
maintains that he is morally sick; Pelagianism holds that he is morally well" 
(Wiggers.) 



NOTES TO CHAPTER VII. 



137 



This system made great progress in Gaul. It had its 
schools, and as early as 475 it controlled two synods, at Aries 
and Lyons, which led to a schism. In the reaction against it, 
a moderate Augustinianism was adopted at the Synod of 
Orange (529), in which Caesarius, the bishop of Aries, was the 
leading advocate. Sixty years later Gregory the Great, bishop 
of Rome, represented the same milder doctrines. Thenceforth 
there were three types of doctrine in the Latin Church — those 
of Augustine, Cassian, and Gregory. 



NOTES. 

I. Three systems in which anthropology is prominent: 

1. Semi-Pelagianism, after Cassian, was advocated by several influen- 
tial men in the West. Vincent of Lerius (435) had his monastery on an 
island near Marseilles. It educated many monks, presbyters, and mission- 
aries. He laid down the famous test of catholic truth, " Whatever is held 
always, every-where, and by all, must be believed." His little " History of 
Heresies " does not contain his own name as that of a heretic, for he thought 
himself sound. Another champion was Faustus, Bishop of Riez, Piedmont 
(456), who devoted his eloquence and his pen to the cause, and roused no 
small controversy in the East. Pope Gelasius put him and Cassian -down 
in the first Index of Prohibited Books. 

2. Moderate Augustinianism. Cassarius of Aries (501-542) was a model 
bishop and missionary, who sought to bring the Gothic conquerors of his 
country out of their nominal Arianism, and to secure the rights of the con- 
quered. By his wisdom, charity, and zeal he did much to harmonize the 
two races and promote civilization. Avitus of Vienne, the Milton of his 
time; Claudian Mamertus, the philosopher ; Salvian, who wrote on "The 
Divine Providence," to show that the Gothic invaders were sent to chastise 
the Church for her sins ; Eucherius, the married Bishop of Lyons, — were 
representatives of the old Gallic Church in her efforts to convert the Ger- 
manic invaders. 

3. Strict Augustinianism was defended by Prosper of Aquitaine and the 
layman Hilary, who informed Augustine of the views of Cassian, and thus 
called forth his last writings on Predestination and Perseverance. Fulgen- 
tius, the exiled African bishop (525), was the theological model of Gott- 
schalk in the ninth century. Isidore of Seville (636) was greatly admired 
in his time. 

II. Eutychianism produced the Monophysite (one nature) and Mono- 
thelite (one will) controversies. Pope Honorius I (625-638) officially in- 
dorsed Monothelitism, and after his death the Sixth GEcumenical Council, 
680, condemned and excommunicated him as a heretic, and this was re- 
peated in 787 and 869 by other councils, and by popes down to the eleventh 



138 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

century — a case of papal fallibility on one side or the other. It also shows 
the power of councils. The existing Monophysites are: 1. The Jacobites 
of Syria. 2. The Copts of Egypt and the Abyssinian Church, founded by 
the missionaries Frumentius and Edesius, whom Athanasius sent out from 
Alexandria. 3. The Armenian Church, planted by Gregory the Illuminator. 
Among all these there are American and European missions. The Maron- 
ites of the Lebanon are the only Monothelites existing as a sect. 

III. The Church in the East reached its highest point, theologically, 
at the Council of Chalcedon, in 451, and thenceforward tended more and 
more to a separation from the Church in the West. Excepting a few refer- 
ences farther on, we shall leave it with this summary. The causes of its 
separation from the West were mainly these : 1. It was Greek in its lan- 
guage and spirit. 2. It was in the Eastern Empire, and greatly subject 
to the emperors, who held their power until 1453, when the Turks over- 
threw them. 3. It differed from the West about Easter-day, celibacy, and 
various customs and ceremonies. 4. It refused to admit the Latin addition 
to the Nicene Creed; namely, the " Filioque," or the procession of the Holy 
Ghost from the Son, as well as from the Father. 5. In the image contro- 
versy of the eighth century it opposed the use of images or statues (but not 
pictures) in the churches, they being admitted generally in the West. 
6. After the Patriarch of Constantinople gained the chief power over the 
Eastern Church he was not willing to be second to the Patriarch of Rome. 
The strife waxed hot when the Eastern patriarch was Photius, a rich noble, 
a very able general, the finest scholar in the Greek Church after Theodoret, 
and put in his chair by Emperor Michael the Drunkard, in 867. He and 
Pope Nicholas deposed each other, and neither would stay deposed. The 
new emperor, Basil, deposed and banished him, but finally recalled him. 
A quite similar controversy in 1054 made the separation complete, and all 
later attempts at reunion failed. In the fourteenth century Pope John XXII 
invited the Greeks to unite with the Latins ; they returned this answer : 
" Exercise your authority over your own creatures. As for us, we can nei- 
ther bear your pride nor satisfy your avarice. So the devil be with you ; 
the Lord is with us !" 



Period III. 



FROM LEO THE GREAT TO HILDEBRAND. 
&. ©. 4-51—1085. 

THE NEW EUROPE — ITS CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY AND SUBMISSION TO THE 
PAPACY — IN THE PROGRESS OF THESE CHANGES THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE 
WEST WAS DESTROYED BY THE GERMANIC PEOPLES — THE GERMAN EMPIRE 
OF CHARLEMAGNE ROSE AND FELL — THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN STATES 
WERE LAID — THE ERA OF MISSIONS — THE BENEDICTINE SYSTEM OF MONASTIC 
LIFE CONTRIBUTED TO CIVILIZATION, DECLINED, AND NEEDED REFORMS — 
CIVIL SOCIETY ABSORBED IN THE CHURCH — IGNORANCE AND SUPERSTITION 
HELD SWAY — IMITATING CHARLEMAGNE, ALFRED THE GREAT ATTEMPTED TO 
PROMOTE EDUCATION AND SOCIAL ORDER IN ENGLAND — THE HIERARCHY 
CULMINATED IN THE PAPAL SYSTEM OF HILDEBRAND. 



Chapter VIII. 

ROME, HER PILLAGERS AND BISHOPS. 

376—600. 

I. New Peoples in Southern Europe. 

Rome was more than the capital ; she was the mother of the 
state, the creator of a realm. This is a peculiar fact. Berlin 
did not create Germany ; but Rome made an empire. Proud 
of her growth and glory, she was cruel to the Church until 
forced to yield ; but in yielding she sought to Romanize the 
kingdom of Christ. The great city must be brought low. 
Outside of her own pagan vices, which powerfully aided in the 
destruction of the empire, the two causes of her fall were 
Christianity and barbarism, or the Church and the Germanic 
peoples. The first gave a new heart to multitudes of her sub- 
jects, converted the throne, caused the removal of the capital, 
destroyed her paganism, and thus took away her heathen life. 
Still the old pride and imperiousness remained. She stood 

139 



140 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

sullen by fireless altars, and at the closed doors of her temples, 
or rioted in her sins. The second cause was that very muscular 
force by which she had gained the mastery over the world. 
It took away her possessions, her cities, her provinces. The 
Germanic tribes had long been moving from the Baltic towards 
richer and sunnier lands. They had often crossed the border 
and made desperate battles. In the time of Theodosius they 
were drawn up for the final onset all along the frontier line 
formed by the Rhine and the Danube. The Saxons were 
ready to cross into Britain. The Franks were eager to step 
over into Gaul. The Vandals would soon pack their wagons 
and march into Spain. The Burgundians were pushing towards 
the Rhone. The two specific tribes of the Goths were on the 
lower Danube, only waiting to move upon Greece and Italy. 

How would these Germans affect society, and what would 
they receive from the Church? The Romans called them "the 
barbarians," and there surely was barbarism enough in their 
fierceness, their love of plunder, their modes of warfare, their 
social revels, and their worship of the Northern gods. But the 
pagan Romans seem to have been more corrupt, and less capa- 
ble of moral convictions. It was hard for Christianity to "do 
its best work on degenerate and worn-out races;" hard to rouse 
any moral sense in converted Greeks and Romans ; and hence 
the Church suffered from their lack of an active conscience. 
The German peoples, whom Dr. Arnold called ' ' the regener- 
ating race," would require centuries of tuition ; but they would 
finally bring into society more honesty, more sincerity and 
truthfulness, a purer sense of justice, a higher regard for human 
rights, a nobler liberty, and a truer respect for woman as 
maiden, wife, or mother. They had a warmer love for kin- 
dred. To be kind to a man was to treat him as one of the 
kin. Their rough virtues put to the blush all the smooth vices 
of the Romans. They had healthy muscle and vigorous mind, 
and would change the civilization of Europe. ' ' The barbarian 
invasion was, on the whole, more of a good than an evil. It 
was a scourge of God ; but Roman society needed scourging, 
and the rod was sent in mercy as well as wrath. A worn-out 
and effeminate race required strengthening by the infusion of 
fresh, vigorous blood. Christianity works on nature, and re- 
news it; yet the renewal is modified by the condition of the 



THE GOTHS— ULFILAS. 141 

nature on which it operates. The history of Christianity in 
Western Europe could not have been what it proved but for 
the new elements infused into European society." Thus much 
upon the providence and philosophy of these movements, by 
which the Church became the real architect of European 
civilization. 

The Goths learned Christianity from captives taken in some 
of their raids. They had often swept through the Greek lands, 
and been east of the Hellespont. The first teachers named 
among them were Theophilus, who sat in the Council of Nice, 
and Ulfilas, or the Wolf-born, who came to Valens, in 376, and 
told him how the Huns were pressing hard upon his people. 
He asked that they might cross the Danube and live on Roman 
soil. Valens was too zealous an Arian to let slip the chance 
of making a convert, and he was likely to demand that his 
faith be accepted with his grant of new homes. Ulfilas was 
too little versed in controversial theology, and too eager for 
the relief of his people to suspect any great harm in Arianizing 
them. So he returned, and as "the Moses of the Goths" led 
them ' ' through the deep waters of the Danube to the Land 
of Promise." But the old corn of the land failed them. The 
emperor sent funds : the Roman officials kept them, and left 
the Goths to starve. The flesh of dogs and even worse rations 
were offered them. They bartered the best goods they had, 
and at last their children. From that hour Justice took their 
part. Ulfilas could not help their revolt. King Fritigern 
brought over more Goths, and even the hideous Huns came. 
And then the human deluge began. The invaders rushed into 
Thrace, pillaged and burnt cities, and recovered their children, 
who told tales of horror. They grew madder on their way 
towards the capital, and Jerome says, "They left nothing alive, 
not even the herds in the fields, till nothing remained but 
growing brambles and green forests." In 378, one million of 
men fought at Hadrianople, where Valens saw his army cut to 
pieces, fled wounded to a cottage, and in it was burnt by the 
Goths. They were allowed by Theodosius to settle upon the 
rich lands which they had overrun. Ulfilas had tried to check 
the war. He led his more Christian peo*ple into the Mcesian 
valleys, where they dwelt as shepherds, and in 388 lamented 
his death. He left them nearly all the Bible translated into 



142 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

their language. He had to construct an alphabet, inventing 
some of the letters. This version was carried by the Goths in 
their migrations as late as the ninth century. Part of it, in 
letters of silver and gold, apparently stamped on parchment 
with hot metal types, is now at Upsal, in Sweden. 

When Theodosius was gone, his niece was the wife of the 
Vandal Stilicho, a far worthier man to rule the West than 
Honorius, who petted chickens at Ravenna, or strolled abroad 
with profligates. It shows to what Rome had come, when her 
safety depended upon the Vandal statesman and general. In 
404, amid the rejoicings over his victories, and the rare visit of 
an emperor, the heathenism of the city was displayed. In the 
coliseum eighty thousand people looked down from the benches 
upon gladiators mauling and stabbing each other, and reddening 
the ground with blood. Such prize fighting always drew the Ro- 
man crowd. It was wild paganism, utterly defiant of the throne 
and the Church. The emperors had tried in vain to abolish 
these brutal shows. Christianity was now to meet them in a 
new way. When the crowd was in wild delight, an old monk, 
Telemachus, who had walked from some Eastern desert, sud- 
denly leaped into the ring, threw himself between the combat- 
ants, and forced their swords apart. The crowd rose, yelled, 
cursed, hurled missiles at the supposed madman, and he fell 
dead. The gladiators finished their bout. But the monk, who 
had laid down his life for humanity, had his victory. The em- 
peror enacted a law which put an end to such barbarous games. 
The coliseum yet stands, but the breach in its side is a symbol 
of the assault which Christianity made upon pagan society. 

Stilicho kept back daring invaders ; one of them was that 
mysterious Radagast, whose two hundred thousand Germans, 
Huns, and Vandals sat in siege around the walls of the old 
Florence, where heat and wine and vice did their work. (406.) 
' ' Like water they flowed in ; like water they sank into the 
soil; and every one of them a human soul." The survivors 
were made slaves to the Romans. 

The other invader was Alaric, the greatest Goth who had 
yet made a line of history. He had failed to obtain Stilicho's 
place as general, had revolted, and had fought his way to 
Athens, where he bathed and feasted, and for one day tried to 
behave like a R.oman gentleman. He had subdued Greece, 



ALARIC— ROME BESIEGED. 1 43 

and his soldiers had lifted him on their shields, and proclaimed 
him king of the Visigoths. A saga whispered to him, "You 
will reach the Italian city by way of the Alps." So up the 
shore of the Adriatic and over the Alps he went, until Rome's 
defender checked him (408). Then Rome put to death Stilicho, 
the hero, the patriot, and the Christian, probably for being too 
loyal, or for wedding his daughter to Honorius, or in that mad- 
ness which was a token of her destruction. This outrage sent 
thirty thousand Roman soldiers into the army of Alaric, who 
leaped to the gates of Rome, and sat down before her walls. 
The Romans began to starve and die. In the famine mothers 
devoured their little children. The pagans clamored for their 
gods and altars to be restored. The senate stripped the gold 
plates from the doors of the capitol to make up a ransom. 
They went to Alaric, but he scorned their money, their pride, 
and their despair. They boasted of their numbers — more than 
a million citizens. He laughed, saying, "The thicker the grass 
the easier it is mowed." More gold was offered ; he grew more 
serious, and when asked what would satisfy him, he answered, 
"All your treasures — all the German captives whom you hold 
as slaves." He had a touch of mercy for his kindred. When 
asked, "What will you leave us?" he replied, "Your lives." 

They bought him off. He added the forty thousand liber- 
ated slaves to his army. He might have asserted himself king 
of Italy, but he claimed to be the vassal of the emperor, who 
went on fighting Jews and heretics rather than Goths, and in- 
flaming pagans by overturning altars, converting temples into 
churches, and taking the income of heathen priests to pay his 
body-guards. In vain did Bishop Innocent try to kindle in his 
soul a love for Italy, and wisdom enough to unite all parties in 
one cause. Amid a confusing series of events Alaric was in- 
sulted by the emperor, at Ravenna, and marching in Gothic 
wrath upon Rome, he pillaged it for five days (409). 

Pelagius saw in the woes of the time a picture of the last 
judgment. Augustine wrote De Civitate Dei to set forth the 
philosophy of history, show that Christianity was not justly 
chargeable with the barbarian conquests, and comfort the Church 
with the assurance that the City of God, enduring on earth 
and eternal in the heavens, shall outlast all cities and empires 
of men. It is the last great Apology from the Ancient Church. 



144 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

What were the effects of this event upon the Christians, the 
Churches, and the city? Of course in the wild tumult there 
were intense sufferings, lawless attacks upon innocence, and the 
shedding of blood. But there was no special assault upon 
catholics. It was not meant to be a war upon orthodoxy. 
The Arian Goths in the city put to shame the Arian Greeks in 
their councils, and laid some restraint upon the savage Huns 
who served in their army. Plunder seems to have been the 
main object of the leaders. The aged Marcella, the friend of 
Jerome, famed for her noble rank and her piety, was beaten in 
order to wring from her the treasures thought to be hidden, 
but really expended in charity. Her patience and courage 
softened the heart of the spoiler, and his rough hand led her to 
one of the churches, where she was safe. Among the num- 
berless captives sold into slavery, or people driven into exile, 
there must have been hundreds of Christians. Augustine gave 
some of them shelter and secured to them means of support. 
Jerome saw them coming to Bethlehem, begging at the convent 
door. Who knows what kindly refuges the monasteries were 
at that time? 

The churches, twenty-six of them, were generally respected. 
Alaric said, "I wage war upon the Romans, not upon the 
apostles." The churches of St. Peter and St. Paul were 
turned into asylums and guarded by soldiers. The pagans ran 
to them for safety. While nothing in a heathen temple was too 
sacred to be left, the treasures of the churches and convents 
were not often disturbed. A Gothic captain, entering some 
Christian building, met an aged nun or deaconess, and civilly 
asked for the gold and silver in her care. She promptly set 
before him an array of massive plate that astonished him. 
"These," said she, "belong to St. Peter. Take them if you 
dare, and answer to God for the deed." He was awe-struck. 
He sent an inquiry to Alaric. The reply was, ' ' Bring them 
into St. Peter's Church." And then a body of Goths formed a 
procession, placed the nun and her associates in line, with the 
sacred vessels on their heads, and began the stately march. 
A crowd of Christians fell into the ranks; psalms were sung; 
cheers rose from the streets, and many thought that after all 
these Goths were men of humane hearts. 

The effects upon the city were beyond estimate. She was 



EFFECTS ON THE PAPACY. 145 

never again the old Rome with her former wealth, grandeur, 
haughtiness, luxury, idolatries, and pagan society. Emperors 
had tried in vain to banish the gods and the vices. Jehovah's 
decree sent Alaric, and the scarlet woman began to walk in 
whiter robes upon the seven hills. ' ' It was pagan Rome, the 
Babylon of sensuality, pride, and idolatry, which fell before 
Alaric ; the Goths were the agents of divine vengeance against 
the paganism which lingered in this its last stronghold." There 
was another effect in the direction of the papacy. "If Chris- 
tian Rome thus rose out of the ruins of the pagan city, the 
Bishop of Rome rose in proportionate grandeur above the 
wreck of the old institutions and scattered society. The cap- 
ture of Rome by Alaric was one of the great steps by which 
the pope arose to his plenitude of power. From this time the 
greatest man in Rome was the pope." He alone had any real 
power that was permanent. 

Alaric moved southward, and at Nola made a well treated 
prisoner of Paulinus, who had been a consul, then a monk, 
and was now a bishop with a wife. He bestowed his immense 
estates upon missions, church erection, and monasteries. If no 
other warm friend of Augustine fared worse than "this emi- 
nent and holy servant of God" did in the hands of Alaric, it 
was proof that the Arianism of these Goths was not so fierce as 
that of the Vandals. In the far south of Italy the conqueror 
stood on the shore shipping his men' for Sicily. A storm 
wrecked their boats. He suddenly died, in 410, and was buried 
in the river-bed near Cosenza. His followers, under Ataulf, 
brother-in-law of Honorius, marched into the lands on both 
sides of the Pyrenees, where the Visigothic kingdom was 
founded, with Toulouse as the capital. Thus a strong Arian 
power was established in the West, very threatening to the 
orthodox Church. In Gaul the Visigoth took from his con- 
quered neighbor half the forest, two-thirds of the farm, and 
one-third of the serfs, and the Gallo-Roman submitted, with the 
politeness of a modern Frenchman, calling his surrender "hos- 
pitality" to his intrusive guest. "So both sides took matters 
philosophically, and amalgamation began forthwith." They 
must have united to put down the Bagaudes, or rebellious 
peasants, in one of whose frequent insurrections Autun, with 
her Latin schools, was destroyed. Interpreting these conquests 

10 



I46 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

in his book on the Providence of God, Salvian (440), the Gallic 
Jeremiah, thought that the sins of his Church were enough to 
bring upon it the invaders. In his strongly drawn contrasts, 
the new peoples appear less debased by luxury, idleness, 
theaters, and vices, than the older Christian inhabitants. 
1 ' They are heretics, but they know it not ; the truth is on our 
side, but they think they have it ; they err, but their intention 
is right." He means that the rudest impulses of barbarism 
are more excusable than the refined vices of civilization ; weeds 
on the common are not so unsightly as grass in a corn-field. 

In Spain the Visigoths made a deadlier assault on the cath- 
olic Church. They stabled their horses in monasteries, fought 
down bishops, forbade councils, burnt creeds, silenced believers, 
and so repressed the Nicene faith that it has been represented 
as dying there without a cry. It found no toleration in Spain 
for more than a century, and no chartered rights until King 
Recared (586) accepted and established the Nicene creed. 

II. Rise of the Papacy. 

Evidently the papacy was not a divine gift to the Church, 
but a human growth within it. By degrees St. Peter was 
regarded as the official primate of the apostles ; imperial Rome 
as the seat of his power ; and her bishops as his successors in 
authority. But for a long time the Roman bishops hardly 
dreamed that residence in a grand city made them great men, 
nor that Roman imperialism was the divinely ordained type 
of Christian episcopacy. After the year 200 we begin to find 
glimpses of assumptions and claims to a limited primacy over 
Churches at a distance, but presbyters and bishops did not sus- 
tain them.* The notable instance of the local Council of 
Sardica (343), of which so much is still made, amounts to this : 
Permission was granted to Bishop Julius to act in a possible 
case of appeal — one that might come from such a bishop as 
Athanasius, recently deposed by the Arians — and Julius was 
specially named, as if he were a commission with delegated 



* Cyprian conceded to the Roman bishop high honor on account of his po- 
sition at Rome and in "the chair of St. Peter," but he said in the Council of 
Carthage, 254, "None of us ought to set himself up as a bishop of bishops, or 
pretend tyrannically to restrain his colleagues." He knew how Peter had writ- 
ten, "I am a co-presbyter." (1 Peter v, 1.) 



INNOCENT I. I47 

power to ratify the deposition or to call a new council, or to 
institute a new trial in a synod of other bishops. It was a new 
and special method adapted to Arian times. His wisdom was 
trusted ; nothing of supreme power, as Bishop of Rome, was 
conceded to him. His act was prescribed, and when done, 
his commission ended. True, he was appointed "in honor 
to the memory of the holy Apostle Peter ;■" but the memory 
of Peter did not mean the supremacy of Peter nor of his sup- 
posed successor. Still later, the Roman bishop was on an 
official equality with the "pope," or primate, or patriarch of 
certain other cities ; and each of them held a position accorded 
to him by a Church which had gradually passed from presbytery 
to prelacy. What raised the Bishop of Rome above this 
equality? Various causes: such as residence in the Mother 
City of the empire; pastoral care of the alleged "Mother 
Church" of the West; a supposed analogy between him and 
the emperor, to whose throne Rome had never surrendered the 
title ; requests for advice, and appeals by persons dissatisfied 
with the acts of synods and of other bishops ; the Germanic 
invasions, which led the oppressed Church to look to him as a 
spiritual father ; his patronage of missions among the new 
peoples ; the fall of the old empire in the West ; but especially 
the ambition, claims, and abilities of a succession of great men 
in the episcopal chair. These men asserted and elevated its 
dignity and power. 

Innocent I (402-417), a man of excellent life, the patriot, 
the noblest Roman of the time, took up the twofold doctrine 
that Peter was the primate of the apostles, and the Roman 
bishop was the official successor of Peter. These points were 
more easily assumed than proved, but with bold men and their 
admirers assumption is proof. "Upon his mind appears first 
distinctly to have dawned the vast conception of Rome's 
universal supremacy ; dim as yet and shadowy, yet full and 
comprehensive in its outline." Having taken the side of Chry- 
sostom in the great Eastern quarrel, he won the favor of the 
better and wiser bishops in the East. His support of Augustine 
secured him favor in the West. But he was far from being 
acknowledged as the sovereign of the whole Church. These 
powers were asserted more boldly by Celestine (423-432), who 
is claimed to have sent St. Patrick to Ireland, and who gained 



148 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

some new timber for his chair in the Nestorian controversy. 
He let the rival patriarchs do all the shameful fighting, and 
managed to get out of it a victory for his office. When his 
letters were read at the General Council of Ephesus the shout 
arose, " Thanks to the second Peter, Celestine, and to the 
second Paul, Cyril ; to Celestine, the protector of the faith and 
unanimous with the Council. One Celestine, one Cyril, one 
faith in the Council, one faith throughout the world." Such 
was the new creed in favor of the Papacy and incipient 
Eutychianism ! 

Leo the Great (440-461) was elected with popular enthu- 
siasm. No man of such commanding intellect and clear knowl- 
edge of theology had ever sat in the chair. We saw how his 
letter was the basis of the creed of Chalcedon. His biography 
would be the history of his times, often called "the Age 
of Leo." He was the first Roman bishop whose popular ser- 
mons have come down to us. He was a Christian Cato, rebuk- 
ing vice, and laying down the law ; a man of no imagination, 
no warmth, but plain, solid doctrine, and a full creed concern- 
ing Christ. He condemned the whole race of heretics, who 
he thought did not deserve any benefit of law, Gospel, or 
charity. Assuming that his' was the chair of St. Peter, he 
wrote, "In his chair dwelleth the everliving power, the super- 
abounding authority. Let the brethren, therefore, acknowledge 
that he is the primate of all bishops, and that Christ imparts 
his gifts to none except through him." To protest against the 
practice of this high doctrine, Hilary of Aries walked through 
the snows over the Alps, without even a mule to carry his 
robes and his evidence ; and he set forth the basis of the ' ' Gal- 
lican Liberties," so famous in the ages down to Pere Hyacinthe, 
when he said that no Gallic bishop could justly appeal to 
Rome, nor the Roman bishop entertain an appeal in a case out- 
side of the Roman diocese.* But Leo had his claims backed 
by the Emperor Valentinian III, who asserted that the empire 
was protected mainly by the Christian faith and Church, and 
that the peace of the Church depended on the primacy of the 
Roman see. Hilary submitted. He was famous for his be- 



*An offending bishop should be tried in his own diocese, and he might 
appeal to some. higher Council. Augustine and others had„ been of Hilary's 
mind. 



ATTILA, THE HUN. 1 49 

nevolence, and for redeeming captives from the Visigoths and 
Burgundians. His eloquent sermons were sometimes four hours 
long, and the people, as a novelty, brought seats into the 
cathedral. 

These were the days of Attila the Hun, who may have been 
"the most powerful heathen king that ever ruled in Europe," for 
his confederation of tribes may have extended from the Baltic 
to the borders of China. A woman's ring led him to think of 
adding the West to his realm. Somewhere in Hungary his 
headquarters grew into a city of tents and hovels. His wives 
and warriors indulged in golden wares, and luxuries, but a 
wooden plate was good enough for him, and he never tasted 
bread. His boast was, that where his horses trod, the grass 
never grew again. In his greatest campaign, he shot across 
the German lands, with a vast army of Huns and all sorts of 
vagabond tribes, and fell upon Gaul. " Who art thou?" asked 
Bishop Lupus, of Troyes, who knew how to fight Pelagians, 
and would not run from a heathen host. "I am Attila, the 
scourge of God." The invader did not sack the town, as was 
his custom, but took the gentle monk with him as a safe- 
guard. At Chalons, in 451, was fought one of the great deci- 
sive battles of history. The men of the West forgot all their 
differences of creed and race, for their country and the Churches 
of Christ were in danger. For once were united Gaul, Bur- 
gundian and Visigoth, Frank, Breton, and Saxon, Arian, Augus- 
tinian and Semi-Pelagian, in one common interest, and they 
won the day, but with immense slaughter. Attila and his 
hordes rolled away into Italy, intent upon Rome. Cities paid 
him vast sums to be spared, or fell by his strokes. When he 
drew near "the Eternal City," Leo came out to meet him, and 
bought him off by allowing him the dowry of that crafty prin- 
cess Honoria, who had started this avalanche of woes when 
she sent her ring to him and asked him to be the champion 
of her political schemes, if not to become her husband. He 
marched away across the Danube, where a German girl, just 
added to his wives, best knew how "the scourge of God" came 
suddenly to his earthly end. He seems to have been stabbed 
in his house. 

Another woman had her plot. The Empress Eudoxia 
brought over from Carthage the Vandal sea-rover, Genseric, 



150 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

to be her champion. He spent fourteen days, of the year 455, 
in pillaging Rome, sent to Carthage ship-loads of treasure and 
captives, and carried off the empress, who paid dearly for her 
treasons. Again the bishops of those cities were active in car- 
ing for the bereaved, the impoverished, the prisoners, the exiles, 
and in ransoming Christians from slavery. 

Here is one feature of that age ; the Church was not un- 
der persecution for her faith, except in Africa, and among 
the Visigoths ; but she was almost every-where in the West 
under pillage. To impress this fact we have dwelt somewhat 
upon the Germanic invasions. No one can tell the distress of 
the Christians in these dreary years. The name of a later town 
is often the only record of the agony. Wimpfen (women's 
pain), on the track of Attila, shows the spot where women 
suffered untold horrors. Churches fell and Christians fled, and 
when the tramp of his horses was heard at Metz, the pastors 
hastened to baptize the infants, for rumors told them to expect 
a general massacre. He left that flourishing city a scene of 
blood and ashes ; only a solitary chapel was spared to mark the 
site. The Goths were not so savage as the Huns. We may 
find the Franks still less murderous. But the Saxons, after 
449, were driving the ancient Britons from their homes, and 
Gildas says that ' ■ priests and people, churches and dwellings, 
were involved in one common ruin." The England thus formed 
was completely under Teutonic paganism. There the early 
Church — feeble at best — was so erased that her story comes to 
us in legends. 

The southern invaders wrought great changes. And yet 
we may be misled by such phrases as ' ' the deluge of barba- 
rians," and "the dissolution of society," and imagine too much. 
We may think that in the whole West one people came and 
another left ; or that the invaders made slaves of all the former 
inhabitants. But the new-comers usually took the richer towns 
and cities, seized the powers of government, compromised with 
the older people, and ruled the two mingled races with some 
degree of equality and fairness. In most of Gaul the Church 
stood forth sublimely amid the rapine and ruin, and sought to 
convert the conquerors? When the Arian Visigoths and Bur- 
gundians were most severe upon the orthodox bishops and 
pastors, it was for reasons very creditable to the older Church. 



THE CHURCH UNDER PILLAGE. 151 

To her the native people looked as their most willing defender. 
' 'It was the bishop who administered justice, redressed griev- 
ances, appeased tumults, sheltered the fugitive in the asylum 
of his palace, and alleviated by his charity the miseries of 
war." Many Roman gentlemen, officials and senators in Gaul, 
such as Eucherius and Sidonius, lost their civil positions and 
became bishops.* Such men carried forward some elements of 
Roman law, language, and literature. They preserved much 
of the old civilization as a basis for modern France. In the 
very years of the great changes many pastors held their ground. 
Their suffering Churches remained. They convened more than 
twenty synods at such towns as Lyons and Aries, and twenty, 
thirty, forty-four bishops were present. Those bishops became 
the great men in society, and often at the courts of the new 
kings. They mediated between the two races. They knew 
more of the Roman law than the barbarians. They became 
magistrates and governors in the cities. The tendency was to 
grow more secular, more ambitious. Hence the power of the 
bishops in the Middle Ages. 

In these wars and compromises between races may be found 
some causes of the decline of piety and learning, the decay of 
schools, the flight of many Christians into monastic life, the 
rearing of monasteries and their use as refuges, and the laws of 
Bishop Leo, who made every church an asylum, as sacred as 
the refuge city of the Hebrews. We have seen what power 
Leo claimed for the Bishop of Rome. He was as zealous 
to see every other bishop hold a power over the presbyters 
in his diocese, and the presbyter ( priest) maintain high authority 
over the people of his charge. It seems that private confession 
to a priest came into vogue. 

* Notice the dates, localities, and religions of the new nations: 

1. Arian — The Vandals and Suevi in Spain in 409, and Vandals in Africa, 
429-534: Visigoths in Spain, 419-711, and in Gaul, 422-507: Burgundians on 
the Rhone, 420-534: Heruli in Italy, 476-493, and subdued by the Ostrogoths 
who ruled Italy, 493-553: Lombards ruled in Italy, 568-774. 

2. Heathen — The Saxons in Britain, 449, but Christianized after 596 : Ail 
the peoples along the east bank of the Rhine and in the Swiss Alps until the 
seventh century. 

3. Orthodox — The Franks, in northern Gaul, about 412: Converted about 
496 under Clovis, who drove the Arian Visigoths southward, and they became 
orthodox about 586, under Recared. The Burgundians orthodox after 510, and 
the Lombards in 595. 



152 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

All this helped to centralize the Church in four ways: i. The 
Church became the center of society. The building was the 
common resort and refuge. The very holidays were the Church 
festivals. The German Yule tide and Easter were identified 
with the Church Christmas and paschal feast. Fewer people 
then than now dared to be non-professors, unbelievers and 
scoffers ; the majority were nominal Christians. Civil society 
was absorbed in Church society : the one became more eccle- 
siastical, the other compromised too much with pagan customs. 
2. The priest, or pastor, became the center of the Church. 
His word was social law ; . his deeds the common talk. By 
him the children were baptized and the parents blessed ; to 
him the penitent confessed his sins, and came for relief in his 
sorrows. 3. The bishop was the center of the priests, or pres- 
byters, of a diocese, and the central personage in a large group 
of churchly communities. In the same way the archbishop 
had a broader influence over bishops and in synods. 4. The 
Bishop of Rome must be pope,* and the center of the whole 
system. Leo aimed at this; the times in the West favored 
him ; the tabulated pastors and people wanted an adviser, 
helper, father ; and the converted kings began to ask his coun- 
sel and mediation. 

Thus the new Europe was forming, and from child up to 
king, from peasant up to pope, all classes of people were com- 
ing into new relations. With all her errors, the Church of the 
West did much good work in the new civilization. ''In Gaul 
the early Church was the one great antagonist of the wrongs 
which were done upon the earth ; she narrowed the range of 
fiscal tyranny ; she mitigated the overwhelming poverty of the 
people ; she promoted the accumulation of capital ; she contrib- 
uted to the restoration of agriculture ; she balanced and held in 
check the imperial despotism;" she revived the uses of free 
voices and free votes, and did more for learning and liberty 
than any other institution or philosophy of that age. We 
regret her mistakes; but wise reapers will thankfully gather 
what sheaves there are, rather than idly censure the plowman 
for not securing a perfect harvest. 



* The title pope, . abba, papa, father, had been applied to nearly all bish- 
ops, then to the patriarchs, and in the West it was gradually limited to the 
Bishop of Rome. 



FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE. 1 53 



III. Fall of the Western Empire. 

Bishop Leo died in 461, at a time when good emperors like 
Majorian could do nothing with a bad people, and usurpers 
cared more for themselves than their country. Count Ric- 
imer, a king-maker, sacked Rome to show that he owned Italy, 
the only remnant of the Western Empire. Another king-maker 
and king-remover was Orestes, who thought that his old master, 
Attila, had been too honest, open-hearted, and magnanimous 
in dealing with Rome. He set up his little son as ruler in 475, 
calling him Romulus Augustulus, after Rome's first king and 
first emperor. In him the old empire of the West practically 
ended forever.* For Odoacer (Odoaker) came down from the 
Noric Alps to seek his fortune. The story is that he was the 
chief of some robbers, and visited the cell of St. Severinus, the 
missionary near Vienna, to ask his blessing. The door was 
low, he was tall, and as he stooped the monk thought him very 
humble and great in spirit. "Go to Italy in your sorry furs," 
said the adviser; "you will soon be rich enough to give gifts." 
Odoacer f served in the army, revolted, slew Orestes, and, in 
476, sent Romulus Augustulus to spend his crownless days in 
a splendid villa near Naples, from which he and his relatiyes 
could look upon Vesuvius and think of social earthquakes. 
After he was gone, that villa, in which the epicure Lucullus 
had spent millions upon art and dinners, was converted into a 
church and monastery, and there the bones of St. Severinus J 
were laid, as if it were to stand as the memorial of the revolu- 
tions and systems of long ages. 

Odoacer brought in the Heruli, with other tribes, and be- 
came a wise, valorous, moderate king. An Arian, yet tolerant ; 
a barbarian, yet a civilizer, ruling Italy seventeen years and 
"keeping some sort of rude order and justice in that wretched 
land," but scarcely aware that as he had done unto others so 
should it be done unto him. He introduced the feudal system 



* Theoretically it was continued until 1806. See Note IV. The ''Middle 
Ages " are sometimes reckoned from 476. See Note V. 

|His brother Hunwolf, Onulf, Welf, or Guelf, went to Bavaria and there 
reared Guelfs, who made a name in the later wars and on the thrones of Europe, 
one of them now reigning in England. 

J Note VI. 



154 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

by giving to his followers one-third of the lands. He left two- 
thirds to the native people, and sought to elevate them by 
industry and better morals. 

Now comes Theodoric the Great, leading the Ostrogoths out 
of the Mcesian Valleys and over the Alps; a great host of them 
on a Winter-march, with wives and children, wagons and cattle, 
grinding their corn in hand-mills, roasting game at the camp- 
fires, carrying their shivering sick and burying little children, 
bringing the Bible of good Ulfilas, and Arian priests to keep 
alive their faith. Three years of war, a treaty, a feast at 
Ravenna, the slaying of Odoacer in some unjust way, and The- 
odoric was master of Italy (493), and founder of the kingdom of 
the Ostrogoths. There he ruled for thirty-three years with a 
vigor, justice, and parental care not paralleled in that age, if in 
any age before Alfred the Great, who seems to have imitated 
him. He did not pillage Rome nor oppress the Italians. The 
unruly Heruli were scattered elsewhere, the peaceful well settled. 
Exiled Romans were brought home. Wars were ended in Italy 
for the present. Law was restored, each race abiding by its own. 
The police was so strict that merchants thronged from all parts, 
and it was loosely said that a man might leave his gold on his 
farm as safely as in a walled city. The races began to cherish 
that mutual admiration which helps to make good society. 

The two great rulers then in the West were Theodoric and 
Clovis, the king of the Franks. They conquered the provinces 
lying between them until their kingdoms touched, and on the 
border the Arian and the Nicean monarchs shook hands in 
peace. Each of them formed alliances with the new nations by 
marriages. Among all of them there was a common language, 
and the same minstrel might sing his rude ballads at the courts 
of Ravenna, Paris, Toulouse, and Dijon, and be surer of ap- 
plauses than liberal pay.* One fact is notable on the side of 



*Out of those times grew two sorts of literature: I. The heroic minstrelsy 
and poetry concerning the German warriors. Even Attila becomes the Etzel 
of the Nibelungen Lied. Theodoric is Dietrich the Strong of Verona. The 
heroes are so transformed that one can scarcely recognize them. For a long 
time Germany has the Minnesingers and France the Troubadours. The Celts 
have their bards and minstrels. 2. The heroic legends in the Church, con- 
cerning persons who are supposed to have miraculously defended churches and 
towns against the invaders; e. g., Genoveva, the peasant maiden, warded off 
Attila from Paris, and to this day is one of her guardian saints. 



TOLERATION. 1 55 

orthodoxy: the Gothic princesses who were married to catholics 
readily gave up their Arianism, while the Frankish princesses, 
who married Arians, adhered to the catholic faith. However, 
Albofleda, the sister of Clovis, must have become an Arian 
after she married Theodoric. This Gothic king gave his fol- 
lowers fully one-third of the lands. He did not care to edu- 
cate them, saying: "The boy who trembles at a rod will never 
face a lance." He had no son, but his daughter, Amalasuntha, 
"the heavenly beauty," received a high culture for the time. 
When she became the ruler, her determination to have her son 
learn the Roman sciences brought a revolt of the Gothic court- 
iers, a conflict of races, and those plots which ruined the 
kingdom. 

The great failure was in not giving a common law and a 
common education to the mingling races. The people became 
industrious, more wealthy, quite highly civilized, and happy. 
Paganism was under ban, but Theodoric was the first great 
ruler who was effectively tolerant to all parties of the Christian 
religion. If the catholics were treated with some severity in his 
last years it was mainly the fault of the Eastern monks and em- 
perors. When a "pillar-saint"* controlled throne and Church 
at Constantinople, a Gothic king might well be disgusted. 
During his reign the Church in Rome and in the East presented 
little else than a series of contentions. He saw the rivals for 
the bishop's chair at Rome in hot strife, and said: "Let the 
man who has had the most votes and been ordained first be 
pope," which was good sense. The Jews were assailed by the 



*In 423 Symeon the Stylite began this sort of hermitry, when he went into 
the desert, not far from Antioch, reared a pillar and stood on its top. He 
finally made it sixty feet high. On it he lived thirty-seven years, engaged in 
devotions, preaching orthodox sermons, drawing vast crowds of pilgrims, and 
securing praises even from the good Theodoret. He is said to have been the 
means of converting many pagans; kings and emperors sought his blessing. 
He attempted to settle the controversies in the Church. He had imitators in 
the East far down to the twelfth century. Western bishops forbade this sort of 
holiness. In Theodoric's time the chief of these "Holy Birds" was Daniel, who 
stood thirty-three years on his column four miles from Constantinople, the 
prophet, the oracle of the capital, and surpassing Symeon in his power over the 
Church and the state. Once he appeared in the city to decide the fate of an 
empire, and place Theodoric's old master, Zeno, on the throne. Zeno sought 
to secure peace in the Eastern Church with the "Form of Union" (Henoticon), 
but failed. 



156 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

catholics; his decree was, "Arrest the ring-leaders;" but, as 
they could not be singled out, he said: "Let the whole cath- 
olic community restore the losses and rebuild the synagogues." 
When this was refused he grew severe, and probably allowed 
one chapel at Verona to be burnt. He took from the catholic 
Italians their swords and allowed them to carry only a common 
knife. The Arians were assailed in the East and West, and he 
wrote to the upstart Emperor Justin: "To pretend to a domin- 
ion over the conscience is to usurp the prerogative of God. By 
the nature of things the power of sovereigns is confined to 
political government. They have no rights over any except 
disturbers of the public peace. The most dangerous heresy is 
that of a sovereign who separates himself from a part of his 
subjects because they believe not as he believes." These, says 
Milman, are ' ' golden words, but mistimed about twelve hun- 
dred years." 

Justin and John, the Roman bishop, along with certain 
senators, were plotting to bring Italy under the power of the 
Eastern throne. This led Thedoric to suspect, wrongly, doubt- 
less, the loyalty of two of the noblest Romans, Boethius and his 
father-in-law Symmachus. Gibbon says: "The senator, Boeth- 
ius, is the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have 
acknowledged for their countrymen." He lived from 470 to 
525, and rose to high honor under Theodoric, who thought that 
all past learning, philosophy, and logic were concentrated in 
his secretary. When the Goth was old and annoyed by the 
Eastern persecutions and plots, he listened to the charges 
involving treason, and threw Boethius into prison, where he 
wrote his book on the "Consolations of Philosophy," so greatly 
admired ever since, the regret being that it scarcely gives evi- 
dence that the author was a Christian. The sad result was that 
the philosopher was horribly tortured to death; the last blow 
was from a club. "It was not Hercules who dealt it; rather 
was it Hercules who died." Symmachus was beheaded. The 
story is that soon afterwards Theodoric, now seventy-four, was 
at dinner; a large fish was brought in; its head seemed to him 
like that of Symmachus, the leader of the senate, when it was 
on the block. He rose up in horror, took to his bed, felt the 
mortal chill, and died (526), confessing that the execution of 
those noble men lay heavy on his soul. 



THE BENEDICTINE MONKS. 1 57 

Another of his ministers of state was Cassiodorus, who ren- 
dered all possible aid to the successors of Theodoric against 
the wiles and armies of Justinian,* until the fate of the- Gothic 
kingdom was sealed by the victories of General Belisarius, the 
conqueror of the Vandals, and captor of Rome. Then the 
scholar resumed his hood, returned to the monastery he had 
founded in Calabria, and wrote history and scientific compends 
which became text-books in the schools of the Middle Ages. 

IV. The Benedictine Monks. 

Theodoric was not admired by the monks, nor did he per- 
mit any of his Goths to enter convents. No doubt he despised 
them as heartily as men now do, who think that a monk of the 
fourth century was the miserable wreck of humanity which they 
find in the fourteenth. Yet at the very time when he was 
repairing the wasted cities of Italy, young Benedict of Nursia 
was reforming the monastic system, and gaining a wider and 
more lasting influence than ever followed a Caesar. There had 
been monasteries in Europe ever since the exiled Athanasius 
had his cells near Rome and Treves. They had increased rap- 
idly. The system was better than that of the East ; the monks 
were not so meditative, and far more missionary ; not trying to 
get so far out of the world, but going into it to subdue its 
paganism, convert barbarians, and comfort the poor. It had 
about it less hermitry, less shabbiness, less glorying in rags and 
self-righteousness, less laziness and ignorance. It did not send 
such wild troops of unwashed devotees into the cities to aid a 
fighting bishop, nor send fanatics into the desert to stand upon 
pillars and rob devotion of its common sense. There were 
exceptions on each of the continents, and Basil represents the 
practical conventism of the East. His rules were carried into 
the West, where the monk often lived amid his books, or with 
his ax and shovel turned forests into harvest fields. 

But monasticism in, its best estate was an error. Its theory 
of life was wrong. It centered a monk's thoughts about him- 
self, in tile effort to destroy self. Its principle of seclusion 
ignored the social virtues, the duties of man to man, the privi- 
leges of home and kindred, the love and law of the family, and 
the very modes of living which God has enjoined. It perverted 

*Note I to this chapter. 



158 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Scripture and nature, when celibacy and solitude were ac- 
counted as modes of holiness. It drew men and women away 
from the open field of common life, in which they may best 
fight the moral battle, and conquer their temptations and their 
sins, after they have put on the whole armor of God in the 
lonely place of prayer. The solitary was apt to become morbid, 
indolent, conceited, or full of trust in his routine of devotions. 
Men living together for years, without any other society, be- 
came coarse, uncleanly, idle, and too often licentious. Women 
in convents had their follies and besetting sins. No doubt 
many overcame the evils inherent in the system, and are justly 
enrolled among the saints. Despite the evils, inherent and 
developed, monasticism did exist as a fact in the Divine Provi- 
dence, and we can not ignore some benefits to the Church 
and civilization from the monks of the West.* 

In Benedict, the Roman noble became a monk. He was 
born a baron over four hundred towns and villages. Cicero's 
friend, Anicius, founded a house which had not lost its glory in 
the time of Augustine, who praised its virtues. One branch of 
it sent Gregory the Great into the papal chair, and another sent 
out Benedict as a reformer. He was born in 480 at Nursia, 
and was placed early in the schools of Rome, where the sins 
of the people tempted him. To be "religious" in that day 
was to be a monk. When fifteen years of age he entered a 
cave at Sublacum, on a lake thirty miles east of Rome. His 
fame brought thither kindred souls, and about that holy grotto 
a large convent afterward rose. He became abbot of a monas- 
tery, tried to reform lax monks, and taught the sons of wealthy 
Romans. There twelve cloisters were built, lands were cleared, 
farms were tilled. Leaving these in good hands, and seeking 

*"The history of monasteries presents enormous corruptions on the one 
hand and vigorous attempts at reform on the other. It would be easy, first to 
cite numerous passages showing the idleness, profligacy, and crime which ex- 
isted in the abodes of reputed sanctity, and then to add as many more indicat- 
ing the sorrow which such excesses inspired in nobler minds. Two great re- 
formers arose, sincere and earnest — Benedict and Bernard ; others, animated by 
the same spirit, came in between them. It was a battle all the way through be- 
tween an unnatural system and nature itself. " ( Stoughton, Ages of Christendom.) 

The same remarks wjll apply to the Church in general, through the Middle 
Ages, for the corruptions, superstitions, pretended miracles, wild legends, and 
abuses of power were not confined to the monasteries, although they so absorbed 
the life of the Church that it became monastic, and lost its original form and nature. 



MONTE CASSINO— THE BENEDICTINE RULE. 1 59 

to escape the hinderances and plots of a dissolute priest, he 
went, in 529, southward to Monte Cassino, near Naples, routed 
a band of robbers, or converted them, destroyed a pagan altar, 
and on the ruins of an old temple of Apollo he reared what 
Montalembert calls "the most powerful and celebrated monas- 
tery in the catholic universe; celebrated especially because 
Benedict there wrote his Rule, and formed the type which was 
to serve as a model to innumerable communities of monks." 
His sister Scholastica built a nunnery in the neighborhood. He 
and she met but once a year, on a mountain side. In his new 
enterprise he labored fourteen years till his death. Though a 
layman, as all mere monks were, he preached through the sur- 
rounding country, superintended the increasing numbers of his 
brethren, made his monastery a great farm-house, manufactory, 
school, church, asylum, hospital, and home. It was noted in 
those warring times for its morality and law. 

He was thirty years perfecting his Rule, or regulations. At 
the basis were the three vows of "poverty, chastity, and obe- 
dience." He doubtless saw that "indolence, self-will, and self- 
ishness were the three arch-demons of the cloister," as they 
are of the outer world, and he sought a remedy : not the best, 
yet not worse than the vices to be cured. All property was 
held in common : no monk owned even a pen, or tablet, or 
book; all belonged to the institution, and must be borrowed of 
the abbot. The monk must regard himself as isolated from 
home, kindred, society, country, and all mankind; he was no 
longer a son, brother, friend or patriot. His three employ- 
ments were worship, reading, and manual labor, along with 
no little meditation and penance. The one hundred and fifty 
Psalms were chanted through every week, and the whole Bible 
seems to have been read in allotted portions. The fasts and 
festivals of the Church were observed. The men rotated in 
work at the bakery, mill, stables, and shops. Groups of 
them toiled on the farm in silence. The plan of a uniform 
costume was new. The color was black, though the style was 
that of the common shepherds and farmers. It was retained 
after the worldly people ran to a new fashion. The good 
brother could be promoted to some office in the convent, or to 
the work of a teacher, or a lay preacher, or be sent to organize 
a new monastery. 



l6o HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Some of the good results of the system were seen in five 
directions, affecting life in all phases and conditions. I. hi 
agriculture. We could name monks who went into a wilderness, 
reared a hut which developed into a group of convent build- 
ings, broadened the garden into a farm, made the valley cheer- 
ful with harvests, rented their lands to tenants, until there grew 
up a village with its chapel, or a city with its cathedral. 
Farmer Benedict did not dream that his followers would become 
the landlords of the finest estates of Europe, and too many 
of them revel in wealth. 2. In hospitality. The convent door 
was open to penniless footmen, and the fugitives from war, fam- 
ine and plague. The hospice on some dreary road was especially 
meant for travelers, pilgrims, and peasants driven out of their 
homes by feudal lords. That of St. Bernard, on the top of the 
Alps," still remains, the oldest existing one of its kind, built 
there in 962 by Bernard, a nobleman of Savoy. Nunneries 
were long the chief places where sad women and sorrowing 
children were sure to find sisters of charity. 3. In human rights. 
Christianity had long preached that every human' being was a 
man, that the meanest slave had a soul, and that a malefactor 
once found a Redeemer by his side on the cross. This doctrine 
was not to be learned in a day, but the monks helped to teach 
it when they protected the weak against the strong. For 
centuries there was scarcely a middle class, a "third estate" 
between the nobles and the laborers. The peasants were sold 
along with the lands. But in the monasteries the rule was 
to treat rich and poor alike; the half-witted serf who had not 
sense enough to serve the king might serve the abbot and have 
his rights. The brave and vigorous enlisted in the army under 
a feudal lord or a fighting bishop : the timid, delicate, and studi- 
ous went into a convent, to escape insult and brutal force. 

4. In missions and education. These were not prominent in 
Benedict's plan, but he did not ignore them. "The monastery 
became the mission-house for the surrounding heathen, and a 
homestead amid barbarous wilds." We shall find the later 
schools connected with the parish church and the convent. 

5. In literature. Benedict ordered his monks to collect and 
copy books. Fortunately for the classics, he said nothing about 
their nature, as if he thought them all religious, and thus an 
open door was left for the poets, historians, orators, and philos- 



GREGORY, BISHOP OF ROME. l6l 

ophers of ancient Greece and Rome. His brother monk Mau 
rus built the first Benedictine monastery in France — that of St. 
Maur on Loire, near Angers — and it became famous for its 
manuscript editions of Bibles, the Fathers, and the classics, dur- 
ing the Middle Ages, and for printed editions of them, and of 
various original works in history and theology, since the six- 
teenth century. This example was widely imitated. The art 
of illumination rendered their books elegant. Hallam says, 
"The Abbey of Cluny had a rich library of Greek and Latin 
authors. But few monasteries of the Benedictine rule were 
destitute of one. It was their pride to collect, and their busi- 
ness to transcribe books. . . . Almost all we possess of the 
Latin classical literature, with the exception of a small number 
of more ancient manuscripts, is owing to the industry of these 
monks." We may wisely heed the proverb, "Speak no ill of 
the bridge that carries you over the stream."* 

V. Gregory, Bishop of Rome. 

The great monk was three years in his grave when his rel- 
ative, the great Bishop Gregory I, was born in 540 at Rome, 
just a century after Leo had taken the chair. He was well 
educated, very rich, a senator, and governor of the city at the 
age of thirty. He built seven monasteries, and, quitting pol- 
itics, retired to one of them, where he began with the most 
menial services, and rose to the office of abbot, very rigid in 
his discipline. The story is that he one day saw, in the slave- 
market at Rome, some fair-haired Saxon boys and girls exposed 
for sale. When told that they were " Angli," he replied, "Non 
Angli, sed Angeli" — not Angles (English), but angels. Other 
puns were mingled with his compassion, and he resolved to be 
a missionary to the Saxons of Britain. He got fairly on the 
way when the pope checked him, and sent him as a legate f 
to Constantinople. There he wrote his Commentary on Job, 
finding in that profound book nearly all natural and Christian 
theology, ethics, philosophy, and the sacraments. Upon his 
return the Romans saw him courageously active during a fam- 
ine and pestilence, and with one voice they elected him 

* On the later reforms of monasticism, see Note III. 

t Leo began this custom of sending papal legates to foreign courts. It be- 
came a great evil, and roused Edward III and Wyclif to the need of reforms. 

II 



1 62 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

"pope." He ran away, hid in the woods, but was found and 
consecrated in 590, and for thirteen years he labored as a 
truly great bishop. 

In him monasticism took the papal chair. He was always 
a monk. He could not endure paganism, however trifling some 
of his superstitions. It even spoiled the classic literature, 
which he despised. Perhaps he burnt some heaps of it, and 
threw some fine statues into the Tiber. It is more certain that 
he laid a check upon certain bishops, who were reading his 
allegorical commentary on Job in their pulpits ; otherwise he 
"might have become the founder of a new religion." He 
objected to being called "universal pope," and yet he asserted 
high powers. Leo had given law to the rising papacy; 1 Greg- 
ory gave it life and love. He was a warm-hearted pastor of 
pastors, as his eight hundred letters prove. He tried to heal 
schisms and convert heretics, though severe upon the wayward. 
He settled episcopal quarrels ; pleaded with kings to show 
mercy to the people and justice to the Church ; rebuked the 
Jews for their slave-trade, but interceded for them when they 
were oppressed, saying: "Do not force them to have their 
children baptized. Do not expel them ; convert them by 
preaching." He cheered King Recared in Spain, who had 
seen his princely brother put to death for his Nicene faith, and 
on becoming king said to the Arian clergy : "I boldly profess 
my brother's faith, and beg of you to embrace it ; for the earth 
has submitted to the Nicene Creed, and all the people of Spain 
except the Visigoths." The change began; the Arian books 
were burnt ; most of the Arian clergy joined hands with the 
catholic bishops, who had long been persecuted. Nor must 
we forget that among the precious relics which Gregory sent 
to the orthodox king w r ere a few reputed hairs of John the 
Baptist, a cross partly of the true wood, and a key made of 
some filings from the chain that bound Paul ! He would not 
have them adored, but kept as memorials. We shall soon 
notice his interest in missions. 

We still sing the Gregorian chants, some of them continued 
from Basil and Ambrose. So deep was his interest in the 
music of the Church that he formed a singing-school, and at 
the rehearsals of his choir sat as the pope of song, cracking 
his whip over certain vocal deacons whose conduct had been 



NOTES TO CHAPTER VIII. 



63 



scandalous. His charities were dispensed by an admirable sys- 
tem, so that all the poor were registered and visited. Among 
them were persons whose ancestors had been consuls and ora- 
tors. The legend is that when he preached a white dove sat 
on his shoulder ; the real dove was his charity, and at no time 
was it whiter than in months of siege and war. 

One day in 595, when he was preaching, messengers came 
saying that Agilulf, the Lombard king, was at the gates of 
Rome with an army. Maimed soldiers, quite out of breath, 
confirmed the sad news. He was at once a patriot. He im- 
parted vigor to the garrison. The Lombard was persuaded or 
paid to abandon the city; but he dragged into captivity many 
who were outside the walls. Then reproaches fell upon Greg- 
ory for the miseries of the citizens. The Eastern emperor 
laughed over his peace with the Lombards. To him he replied, 
"If I had sought their death their nation would to-day be 
without king, duke, or count, and would be in utter confusion." 
He had gained a nobler object ; for when Agilulf was at the 
gates Gregory was corresponding with the orthodox queen, 
Theodolinda, and through this woman the Lombards were 
brought over to the Nicene faith. The king restored the spoils 
he had taken from the churches, reinstated the bishops whom 
he had expelled, and raised the clergy from abject poverty to 
comfort and influence. Now the Romans entitled Gregory the 
Father of his Country, but the Lombards were masters of Italy. 



NOTES. 

I. The Eastern Emfieror Justinian (527-565) appears great in history 
for these reasons: I. He closed the last school of pagan philosophy when 
he silenced the seven followers of Proclus at Athens. 2. His general, Beli- 
sarius, conquered the Vandals in Africa, in 534, and gave liberty to the 
North African Church. 3. Belisarius and Narses expelled the Goths from 
Italy, and opened it to the Lombards, who were led by their first king, 
Alboin (568-573). "The overthrow of the Gothic kingdom was to Italy an 
unmitigated evil," says Milman. The Lombards ruled there until reduced 
by Charlemagne, in 774. 4. Belisarius drove back the powerful King of 
Persia, Chosroes, a noble ruler, who promoted learning, was far more toler- 
ant than Justinian, and gave the Christians in his realm peace and freedom. 
5. Bishops were restrained in their luxury and avarice, and sent from the 
court to their charges ; heretics severely treated ; and seventy thousand 



• 



164 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

converts added to the Church. 6. Zeal for architecture ; many churches 
were built. When he had rebuilt the Cathedral of St. Sophia he exclaimed, 
"O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" 7. The code of Roman laws, which 
have still their influence in Europe. 

II. Peculiarities in the Church in the year 600. In theology and ex- 
egesis men quote from the Fathers rather than produce original works ; 
errors creep in, though the great creeds are maintained. Chronicles and 
legends take the place of history. Preaching declines ; the liturgy forms 
the chief service ; public worship still in the language of the people. Pau- 
linus of Nola uses pictures in the church to illustrate Scripture, and bells to 
summon people to church ; images begin to be introduced. Absorbing at- 
tention to the externals of religion. Baptism by immersion and pouring ; 
infants baptized, unless the parents fear that post-baptismal sins are unpar- 
donable. A saving power often attributed to the sacraments. Saving merit 
ascribed to penances, fasting, building churches and convents, and observ- 
ance of the multiplied festivals. Christians adopted many pagan customs; 
divination and ordeals practiced. Clerical celibacy enjoined by several 
Western councils (506-585), but not yet fully adopted. Worship paid to the 
Virgin Mary : exaggerated or invented legends of saints. 

III. European monasticism presents so many orders of monks that the 
history seems confusing. The following plan of three periods may show a 
principle of unity and a progress in the system. 

1. The period of introduction, individuality, and experiment, from Atha- 
nasius, 335, to Benedict, 529. Each convent chose its own rule ; that of 
Basil the most practical. The Culdees in Scotland were peculiar, more 
freedom being allowed. 

2. The period of systemization and unity from Benedict, 529, to Berno, 
of Cluny, 912. Nearly all monasteries on the Continent were brought 
under the Benedictine rule. To this the Columbanian convents were sub- 
jected in the ninth century. In 1350 there were said to be thirty-seven 
thousand Benedictine houses. 

3. The period of Reforms, from Berno, 912, to Ignatius Loyola, 1540; 
each reform starting from the Benedictine basis. Nearly every reformed 
branch had its offshoots, and came to need reformation. Each century 
from the tenth to the sixteenth produced one new order or more. The 
leading reforms were : 

(1.) The Cluniac reform in the tenth century. Berno founded Cluny in 
Burgundy. The order spread rapidly and grew rich in lands. Its fifth 
abbot was called King Odilo. In 1300 it had two thousand monasteries. 

(2.) The Carthusian retorm in the eleventh century. Bruno, a pro- 
fessor of philosophy at Cologne, founded the house at Chartreuse, in Dau- 
phiny, about 1055. The rule was very strict; nuns could not endure it. 
The order grew wealthy, cultivated literature, and claimed that it "never 
needed a reform." In this century rose the Camildoli in the Apennines, 
the monks of Hirshau, in Germany, and the Grandimontanes, or Good men, 
in France. 

(3.) The Cistercian reform, in the twelfth century, began at Citeaux, 



NOTES ON CHAPTER VIII. 1 65 

near Dijon, in France, about 1100. Its chief organizer was Stephen Hard- 
ing, an Englishman, who introduced the new principle of confederation ; the 
Cistercian abbots were required to meet in a synod once a year, unless 
resident in distant lands. This principle was adopted by the later orders. 
The Cistercians grew rich and popular after St. Bernard established his 
house at Clairvaux. By 1200 they had two thousand convents. 

(4.) The Dominican and Franciscan reforms in the thirteenth century; 
chartered in 121 5. 

(5.) The spiritual or pietistic reform by the Mystics and the Brethren 
of the Common Life, in the lower Rhine countries, during the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries. 

(6.) The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in the sixteenth century, founded by 
Ignatius Loyola, 1 540 ; a new system intended to counteract the Protestant 
reformation. 

4. Exceptional orders. (1.) The Augustinian canons. The canons 
were the bishops' helpers about the cathedrals. In the twelfth century they 
attempted to reform the clergy. Among them were the Premonstrants and 
Gilbertines. (2.) The Crusade orders — Templars, Hospitalers, and Teutonic 
Knights. (3.) The Fraternities, namely: the Oratorists, 1550, founded by 
Philip Neri at Rome ; and the Paulists, or Lazarists, from Vincent de Paul 
at Paris, 1632 ; they started "Foundling Hospitals" and "Sisters of Charity." 

IV. The theory of a Western Roman Empire was long maintained in 
Europe as a sacredly political idea, as a support or rival of the papacy, and 
as an opponent of the Eastern Empire. It greatly affected the theories con- 
cerning the Church and her relations to the state. "The empire may have 
been a shadow," says Freeman in review of Bryce's Holy Roman Empire, 
"but it was a shadow to which men were for ages ready to devote their 
thoughts, their pens, and their swords." This is the key to the political 
history of mediaeval Europe, and to much of the papal history since Leo 
the Great. The emperors ruled it as the "German Empire," the popes 
sought to control it as the "Holy Roman Empire." It became a nominal 
power, and ended in 1806 with Francis Joseph. 

V. The Middle Ages — a period between the decline of the ancient 
Church and the rise of Protestantism — are differently limited by different 
writers, according to their main subjects. The beginning is fixed at 451, 
476, 590, or 750, and the close at 1453, 1500, 15 17, or 1520. These dates 
show that the terms Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern are applied to ages 
which did not begin nor end abruptly, for one glided into another. The 
arbitrary terms may be convenient, yet they should not break the unity 
of history. 

VI. We find ?nore reputed miracles than credible facts concerning 
Severinus, "the Apostle of Noricum." It seems that he went to the relief 
of the Church in Austria and Bavaria, and labored to convert the Ger- 
manic invaders, and restored or founded several churches. But the waves 
of conquest swept over them, and the history of Christianity began anew in 
those lands with later missionaries. 



166 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



Chapter IX. 

THE PRANKISH EMPIRE AND CHURCH. 

481-900. 

Clovis founded the greatest of the early kingdoms in West- 
ern Europe, and became the champion of the Nicene faith. 
He began his career in 481, a fierce pagan, fifteen years of age, 
with scarcely a foot of land in the France of modern times, 
and the chieftain of the Salian Franks, who could muster only 
five thousand warriors. No wilder men, with barer heads, and 
longer, redder hair, had ever crossed the Rhine. They stripped 
their game to clothe themselves in rough furs, and, perhaps, 
their francisca, their war-hatchet, gave them their now enno- 
bled name. With these men of the battle-ax he cut his way 
to Soissons, conquered the last remnant of the Roman power, 
and proved himself a king. In time he made Paris his capital. 

The conversion of Clovis, whether real or nominal, is one 
of the decisive events of history. Once more a woman was 
the agent of immense good to the Church. The Princess Clo- 
tilda, of Burgundy, seems to have learned the orthodox faith 
from some such teacher as Avitus, of Vienne. She saw her 
father slain by his brother Gundobald, who seized the throne 
and displayed his zeal for Arianism. She accepted the hand of 
Clovis in 493, and on the bridal journey to his court she rode 
across the border in the light of burning villages, which she 
caused to be set on fire to express her flaming vengeance upon 
her uncle. In a far nobler spirit she sought the conversion of 
her husband, although she talked too much about the reputed 
miracles at St. Martin's tomb, and tried to affect him by im- 
posing ceremonies. He permitted their first child to be bap- 
tized ; it soon died, and he charged the sad result upon her 
religion. The next child was baptized and fell sick ; she prayed 
and it recovered. But he still resisted her entreaties. He ad- 
mired Bishop Remi, of Rheims, to whom he had given some 



THE GALLIC CHURCH. l6/ 

lands, probably to atone for having let his soldiers pillage the 
church ; the bishop donated them to charitable objects, lest he 
should be thought greedy of wealth. Clovis thus came some- 
what under the influence of a good man who would be his 
life-long counselor, so far as Clovis ever yielded to advice. 
We shall often see that the missionary seeks to convince a king, 
and through him convert the nation. This may have been the 
policy of Remi. But he seemed to fail. At length the Alle- 
manni crossed the Rhine and Clovis rose to drive them back. 
At Tolbiac, near Cologne, when the furious battle seemed 
doubtful, he declared that his gods had failed him, raised his 
hands to heaven, invoked the God of Clotilda to help him, and 
vowed that if he were victorious, he would accept the Christian 
faith. He won the field, returned home, and was instructed by 
Bishop Remi at Rheims. When he was baptized on Christ- 
mas, 496, with all possible splendor, the bishop said to him, 
"Bow thy head, Sicambrian ; worship what thou hast hitherto 
burned; burn what thou hast worshiped." Three thousand 
warriors were that day baptized. The Frankish nation was 
nominally converted. Such a national conversion could not 
result at once in personal piety in king or subject. One day, 
when the bishop was reading to him the account of our Lord's 
crucifixion, the strong man was so moved that he sud- 
denly sprang up, laid his hand on his sword, and exclaimed, 
' ' Had I been there with my Franks I would have avenged his 
wrongs !" 

We judge not the motives of Clovis. We regret that 
many of his acts must be called crimes. Yet two facts are 
plain : the Most High used him to render a vast service to 
Christianity ; and the Church of Gaul, whose fathers were such 
men as Irenaeus, Hilary, St. Martin, and Lupus, was the right 
arm of his power. "It was the Church that made the fortune 
of the Franks." It helped him to bring the whole country 
under his dominion. It looked to him as a deliverer. It 
united in a common faith and loyalty the Celts and Franks 
north of the Loire. South of that border line the orthodox 
were under the rigorous hand of the Arian Visigoths and Bur- 
gundians. There was likely to rise the cry, "Come over and 
help us." The old Roman Gauls would welcome the orthodox 
invader. When he was making his conquests Avitus, of Vienne, 



1 68 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

wrote to him, "Your faith is our victory, for our prosperity is 
affected; as often as you fight we conquer." 

Clovis was soon told by the pope that he was the only 
catholic sovereign in the world, for all other Western kings 
were Arians, and the Emperor Anastasius in the East was a 
Eutychian. He was by the pope honored with the titles of 
"Most Christian King" and "Eldest Son of the Church." 
These titles have ever since been given to the kings of France. 
The Eastern emperor called him a Roman consul. All this 
may have filled him with a pride which lifted him above the 
most royal morality. He soon resolved to humiliate Burgundy. 
Gundobald called together the clergy at Lyons. He said 
sharply to the catholics: "Why do you not restrain the king 
of the Franks, if yours be the truly Christian religion? Let 
Clovis show his faith by his works, and not make war upon a 
relative and brother king." Bishop Avitus did not ask why 
the Arian brethren at his side had not restrained Gundobald 
from his murders, but frankly said: "I am ignorant of the de- 
signs of Clovis ; but since the Holy Scriptures assure us that no 
kingdom can stand when it departs from the law of God, let 
me exhort the king to seek security by embracing the true 
faith." Gundobald was still haughty, until Clovis came dow r n 
upon him with an army, reduced him to allegiance, and forced 
him to place the catholics on an equal footing with the Arians. 
Gregory of Tours, " the father of French history, " says : ' 'King 
Gundobald instituted the most mild laws in order that the 
Romans [Gauls, among whom were the orthodox Christians] 
might not be oppressed." Some of them amount to this: "The 
condition of the Burgundian and the Roman is the same before 
the law; all legal difference has vanished." One law is a pic- 
ture of the time; it runs thus: "If a Burgundian find a traveler 
at his door asking hospitality, and shall send him to the house 
of a Roman, and this can be proved, let him pay three solidi 
to that same Roman, and three more by way of fine." 

Clovis next said to his warriors: "It grieves me to see the 
heretic Visigoths holding the finest part of Gaul. Let us, with 
God's help, march and subdue them." Threats came from the 
great Theodoric, who had learned that his Gothic kinsman, 
Alaric II, was in peril. But Clovis was soon at Tours, where 
omens and miracles are said to have aided him. The catholic 



PROGRESS IN CIVILIZATION. 169 

population gladly supported him, and almost entirely forsook 
the Arian king. Not far from Poitiers, in 507, the two armies 
met, and fought for the mastery of Gaul and for two different 
creeds. Clovis slew Alaric with his own hand, routed the Vis- 
igoths, and finally drove nearly all of them into Spain, where, 
eighty years later, they renounced their Arianism. Clovis was 
now regarded as the new Caesar restoring the old empire, and 
the new Constantine defending the Nicene faith. By no little 
fraud and violence he carved out a wide kingdom, and left it 
to break in four pieces, when it fell to his four sons. His zeal 
for the Church was the veil over the murder of his Frankish 
rivals. The good bishop Remi said to his detractors: "Much 
must be pardoned to him who has been the propagator of the 
faith and the savior of the provinces." The excellent Gregory, 
of Tours, with perfect coolness and without a censure, wrote of 
Clovis: "Thus God daily cut down his enemies under his hand 
because he walked before him with an upright heart, and did 
that which was well-pleasing in his eyes." These bishops were 
looking upon the better results secured to Christianity and 
civilization, such as these: The unity of races and tribes with 
more law and less outrageous barbarism; more unity in the 
Church of that realm, with an increase and security of its prop- 
erty ; an elevation of the clergy in social and civil life, if -not in 
their moral and intellectual strength ; the rearing of monasteries 
and houses for the relief of the poor, and the right of asylum 
to the oppressed who fled to the churches or homes of the 
priests. This latter privilege was greatly abused by vagabonds 
and robbers who did their plundering by night, and hid by day 
at the sacred altars defying the officers of justice. Nor was it 
always granted to better men. In 586 Pretextatus, bishop of 
Rouen, having offended the notorious Queen Fredigonda, was 
stabbed at high mass on Easter-day in his cathedral. The 
Frankish princes of her time revealed a depravity that was 
frightful, and scarcely paralleled in history. 

The successors of Clovis, down to Duke Pipin of Heristal, 
(700), were quite well portrayed in a dream invented to rouse 
one of them from his wickedness. In it Clovis appeared as a 
lion ; his sons and grandsons as ravenous bears and wolves ; and 
after them the little dogs, or "do-nothing kings." The royal 
courts were demoralized ; the Church kept up some sort of light 



170 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

in dark and stormy places. We pass to the times of the great 
Duke Pipin, who won the power over all the Franks, robed him- 
self splendidly and rode proudly through the land in an ox-cart, 
held assemblies to promote justice and good order, till in 715 
the kingdom passed to his brilliant son, Charles Martel, the 
hammer of political sinners and Saracen infidels. In their time 
there were three movements of vast influence upon the Church : 
aggressive missions east of the Rhine; the secularization of 
the clergy; and the victory over the Mohammedans south of 
the Loire. 

I. Pipin of Heristal made wide conquests in Germany, 
recovering the ancient lands of the Frankish tribes. A door 
was opened for the entrance of Christianity in all that country. 
In the next chapter we shall see an army of Celtic, Frankish, 
and Anglo-Saxon missionaries there waging their spiritual 
battles. 

II. Charles Martel (715-741) took the wealth of the Church 
rather violently, and used it to pay the soldiers who beat down 
his rivals. He then put many of his officers into bishoprics 
and abbacies, and secularized the clergy ; bishops rode about 
like feudal lords, counts, and dukes ; pastors did little good 
preaching or. visiting; the monasteries grew dissolute; the priests 
were grossly ignorant, and many of them licentious; and "like 
priest, like people." Reforms were needed. In some degree 
they would come through the next great Frank, Charlemagne. 

III. The great battle of that age in Europe was fought. 
If the West was saved from the horrid savagery of the Huns 
in 45 1 at Chalons, and from Gothic Arianism in 507, near 
Poitiers, it was defended in "the Battle of Tours" from a 
deadlier foe to Christianity in 732, when the Saracens were 
resolved that — 

"Like the Orient, the subjected West 
Should bow in reverence at Mahommed's name." 

A new power had suddenly risen in the East. The spirit 
of Ishmael had become fanaticism in Mohammed. This power- 
ful Arab (570-632) had become disgusted with the idolatry and 
polytheism at his native Mecca, and he saw only an impure 
form of Christianity in that land. The poor man, honest in his 
business affairs, a shrewd agent of the merchant widow Kadijah, 



MOHAMMEDAN CONQUESTS. 171 

married her and she helped turn his epilepsies and trances into 
pretended inspirations and revelations. One result was his fiery 
preaching of the unity of God, and that basket of curious 
scraps and impostures, the Koran. His cry was: "Allah, 
Allah, there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his 
prophet." There were in this Monotheistic system a few 
great truths, which some writers think should have the credit 
of its conquests, rather than the confused mass of errors. But 
its direct power was the sword. The Meccans persecuted the 
bold preacher, and the few followers which he had been long 
years in winning. They fled to Medina. On the way the 
prophet hid in a cave; a spider may have woven a web over 
its mouth; and his friend, Abu Bekr, said mournfully: "There 
are only two of us." " He replied cheerfully: "There are three; 
the third is Allah himself. Blessed be Allah!" Then began 
his vast success. Instigated by persecution, he took the sword 
and promised a gorgeous paradise to every follower who should 
die in battle for the new faith. He conquered Mecca, and made 
it the holy city of believers and pilgrims through all the centu- 
ries. He brought Arabia under his power. Two years after 
his death Damascus was taken, then Antioch and Jerusalem 
fell. Twenty years later Syria and Persia were under Saracen 
sway; Alexandria submitted, and her library of seventy thou- 
sand volumes went out in flames. The conquerors boasted of 
having taken thirty-six thousand cities, towns, and castles, de- 
stroyed four thousand Christian churches and several thousands 
of idol temples, and built fourteen hundred mosques. The 
defeat of one hundred and twenty thousand Moslems at the 
gates of Constantinople in 718, by the Eastern emperor, Leo 
III, the Iconoclast, is one of the great events in history. It 
kept a part of the Church from their ravages for seven hundred 
more years. The fatal "Greek fire" was long a defense of 
Christianity. They swept on eastward to the borders of China, 
and westward to the Atlantic, mastering a wider realm in eighty 
years than Rome had subdued in eight hundred years. They 
threatened to reduce the whole Church to a state of wretched 
dependence. It might exist, but in existing starve. They 
offered to men the choice of three things — tribute, the Koran, 
or the sword. 

About the year 710 some Christians of Spain were greatly 



172 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

offended by the injustice of King Roderic, the last of the Goths. 
They asked an Arab chief in Africa to come and deliver them 
from tyranny. He went, and they soon had a greater tyrant 
over them, for the Saracens subdued Spain and drove bands of 
Christians into the mountains, where they formed the little 
kingdom of the Asturias. The conquerors pressed northward 
over the Pyrenees, sacking cities, pillaging churches, laying 
waste the country, until they were in the center of France. On 
a field between Poitiers and Tours* the question was whether 
the cross or the crescent should prevail in the West; whether 
lustful Arabism or hopeful Teutonism should control Europe. 
Charles Martel brought down his Franks and faced 

"A countless multitude,: 
Syrian, Moor, Saracen, Greek renegade, 
Persian and Copt, and Tartar, in one bond 
Of erring faith conjoined — strong in the youth 
And heat of zeal — a dreadful brotherhood." 

The crash came ; the fight went on for six days, and one 
hundred thousand Mohammedans were slain and routed (hardly 
three hundred and fifty thousand fell, as the monks say); so that 
the Franks won the victory, a crowning mercy for the Church, 
and "one of those signal deliverances which have affected for 
centuries the happiness of mankind." Still later Charlemagne, 
protecting modern Christendom, drove a Moslem host back 
into Spain, where they ruled and declined until 149 1. Then on 
a certain day they gave up their last fortress at Grenada ; on 
that very spot, soon after they resolved to embark for Africa, 
Columbus had his charter signed by the victorious Queen Isa- 
bella. And here is one reason why no Mohammedans sailed 
out of Spain into the New World. 

We pass to the grandson of Charles Martel, Charlemagne, 
the creator of an epoch, "the father of modern Europe." In 
768, at the age of twenty-four, he ruled a kingdom ; the forty- 
six years of his reign made it a vast empire. He was great in 
body, mind, purposes, ambition, and success. He has been 
called the Frankish Solomon. He was simple in his dress, a 
part of which was woven at home; and when his courtiers be- 



*The great battle is named after both of these cities, which are one hun- 
dred and fifty miles apart. 



CHARLEMAGNE. 173 

gan to wear silk and satin he once led them out on a hunt and 
into a heavy rain, to take the starch out of their finery. He 
was temperate at the table, hating drunkenness, fond of the 
chase, full of good humor, fresh in his spirit, a fluent talker, 
genial among friends at home, but terrible to his foes every- 
where, and sometimes regardless of human life. He came upon 
the royal stage ignorant, unable to write his name, a rough and 
ready king, with mighty forces in him, and with some big ideas 
to make real in his age. He inherited no culture, and made 
his own civilization. He came to be president of his own 
royal academy; the patron of scholars, and no small scholar 
himself; the founder of schools, and their most interested vis- 
itor ; the reformer and wise adviser of the clergy ; and the rare 
man who held in his powerful grasp the reins of the army, the 
state, and the Church. In the Roman calendar he is a saint ; 
in heroic legend he is the universal crusader, rushing unseen 
into the dust of battle, and aiding all true cavaliers ; and in the 
songs of minstrelsy he is "dreadful to his foes, kind to the 
poor, merciful to offenders, devoted to God, an upright judge, 
who knew all the laws, and taught them to his people as he 
learned them from the angels. In short, he bore the sword as 
God's own servant." He so impressed the imagination of men 
that the historian must separate his actual deeds from the 
romances of poets, and his morals from the praises of the can- 
onizers. With all his divorces, he had still too many wives at 
one time, and yet no courtesans managed him as they did the 
Eastern emperors. Like Theodosius, he was willing to be put 
under penance after some cruelty. Now he stands in the ca- 
thedral, merely whispering the loud anthem of which he is so 
fond ; again he fasts eight hours in the day, and, wrapped in 
his long cloak, he sits on the steps of the church, listening to 
the solemn chants through half the night. He had a soul for 
music. His outbursts of heroic inhumanity and his sorts of 
immorality were "precisely the failings which the gross and 
semi-barbarous society of that day either encouraged and ap- 
plauded, or excused and ignored." He died at the age of 
seventy-one, almost to the last day a healthy giant ; and his 
tomb at Aix-la-Chapelle * (the Chapel at the Springs) repre- 

* Ace-la-Shapel, or Aachen, the chief seat of government under Charlemagne, 
who quite neglected Paris. He had been crowned at Noyon. 



174 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

sented him sitting upon a throne of gold, his crown surmounted 
with a cross, a globe-like chalice in his hand, his sword Joyeuse 
at his side, his pilgrim's pouch hanging from his girdle, his 
scepter and shield at his feet, and the Book of the Gospels on 
his knee. These were the symbols of his character and history. 
Men use a breaking-plow, not as a model of elegance, but 
as an instrument for cutting up the roots and turning over the 
sod of wild lands. Thus the Lord has employed human agents 
from the time of Noah, and Charlemagne was among the 
mightiest of them. His policy was to secure three grand re- 
sults : the union of the Germanic nations on the Continent in 
one monarchy ; its elevation by Christianity and civilization ; 
and its alliance with the papal power. This will appear when 
we glance at his many-sided character and his achievements. 

I. The Conqueror. His wars were waged for thirty -two 
years. Carrying out what Clovis had begun, he reunited the 
Franks, shut up the Saracens in Spain, conquered the Lom- 
bards in Italy, and also reduced to his sway most of the coun- 
tries now called Austria and Germany. After the year 800 
he made no more conquests. He assumed no imperial title 
until the pope conferred it* He was not simply a French, 
but a German, ruler. 

II. The Emperor and his relation to the papacy. Two powers 
had been growing in strength : Frankish kingship had become 
imperial, and the Roman bishop had become a pope. They 
had helped each other. Clovis had been "the eldest son of 
the Church," the first king in all the West to do homage to 
the man who sat in "St. Peter's chair," and he had made that 
chair stronger by his victories over Arianism. A pope had 
made the second Pipin King of the Franks (751-768), and this 
"anointed of the Lord" marched to Rome, drove the Lom- 



* Charlemagne's dates are : Born at Aix-la-Chapelle (?) in 742 ; king east of 
the Rhine, 768; sole king of the Franks after Carloman's death, 771-814; cor- 
respondence with Haroun Al Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad, began 768; first war 
on Saxons of Germany, 772; subjection of the Lombards in Italy, 773-774; 
second war on the Saxons, 775-777: war against the Saracens in Spain, 778; 
third war on the Saxons, who had almost reached Cologne, 778-785 — during 
which he executed about forty-five hundred prisoners in one day, and forced 
baptism on the conquered chiefs ; victories over the Huns and Bulgarians, 
785-800 ; called to suppor-t Pope Leo III against a rebellion in Italy, and 
crowned emperor, 800. From that time he devoted his remaining fourteen 
years to the culture and civilization of his people. 



THE IMPERIAL CROWN. 1 75 

bards from its gates, brought them to terms of peace, and in- 
sisted on their surrendering Ravenna and its towns to Pope 
Stephen III, who is said to have offered them to St. Peter, St. 
Paul, and the Roman bishops, and thus secured to the popes 
the main basis of their temporal power.* Such was the famous 
" Donation of Pipin," which, if genuine, set the popes among 
the earthly princes, and began to furnish them with men for 
their armies. The son of this donor, Charlemagne, gave other 
cities and lands to Hadrian I, the pope who seems to have 
palmed off upon Europe the grandest forgery by which the 
papacy rose to its highest power. This was the collection of 
" Decretals" bearing the name of Isidore of Seville, and pre- 
tending to show that the early bishops of Rome had heard 
appeals from distant quarters, and decided cases by their own 
authority. The fraud was not really exposed until the sixteenth 
century, long after their purpose had been served. 

Charlemagne had now the ambition for the title of the 
Caesars, for the shadow of the old Roman name fell upon him. 
He had more than once defended Rome ; in 800 he went again 
to protect its bishop, who was his vassal and spiritual lord. 
On Christmas he and his courtiers, with the grandees of the 
old city, met in the cathedral. Pope Leo III chanted the mass; 
and when the King of the Franks must have been delighted 
with the music (if it be true that he knew not what was com- 
ing) the pope advanced with a splendid crown, put it on his 
brow, and proclaimed him Caesar Augustus. At once the 
shouts arose from people, nobles, senators, soldiers, and clergy, 
"Long life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned by God, 
the great, pious, and pacific Emperor of the Romans." Then 
he was anointed by papal hands. 

Thus, in the glamour and worship of the old name, Rome 
once more chose her own Caesar, and placed herself at his feet ; 
for he was really greater than her pope and senate, and they 
added nothing to his actual power. It pleased her, and did 
not injure him. She was flattered with an imagination of her 
ancient greatness ; he was dignified with new honors, which in 
the eyes of all the world were the most glorious that could be 
worn on earth. There were five important and quite perma- 



* Notes I, II. The temporal power of the pope began about half-way be- 
tween the birth of Christ and the Reformation (15 17). 



176 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

nent effects: 1. The papal power was strengthened. Future 
kings and emperors must protect the pope, or do insult to the 
example of the great Charles. They were likely to court him 
for a crown, until their sense of manly liberty should grow 
strong. The new nations were nearly all led to a higher rever- 
ence for the pope. 2. The emperor had now more fully the 
support of the Church, and he seemed to be "a different be- 
ing from the mere barbaric conqueror. His rule was at once 
changed from a dominion of force into a dominion of law." 3. 
The old races of Europe, which counted themselves Romans, were 
now united with their conquerors in one Christian monarchy; 
the one thought that the ancient order was restored, the other, 
that the new system was fully indorsed. "The coronation of 
a Teutonic prince at Rome was an act of reconciliation and 
union between the victorious and the vanquished races." Thus 
there might be more social and religious equality among Celtic 
and Frankish neighbors in the West. 4. Sanction was given 
to a theory which prevailed in the Middle Ages, that the state 
and the Church were the two powers of one theocracy. "The 
empire and the Church were to support and serve one another, 
living together like body and soul ; the empire guarding the 
interests of the Church with the sword, and the Church conse- 
crating the organization and work of the empire." Thus they 
would maintain a balance of power. The theory would fail 
when either state or Church became corrupt or tyrannical. 
5. The power of the Eastern Empire was ended in Italy, and 
was thenceforth overshadowed by the Western powers of 
France, Germany, and the Roman papacy. The whole course 
of history was changed. 

Charlemagne lived and dressed a few days in Roman style, 
and went away the simple, hearty German as of old, to his 
homespun blouse, his books, and future peace. Perhaps it was 
the pope who set on foot the vast scheme of uniting the East 
again with the West, by the marriage of the German emperor 
with the Empress Irene, at Constantinople. A usurper drove 
her from her throne, and ended that project. The Greeks be- 
,gan to say, "Have the Frank for thy friend, but not for a 
neighbor." Already was he in friendly alliance with the wisest, 
noblest, and mightiest Caliph of the East — the scholarly 
Haroun-Al-Raschid (Aaron the Just), of Bagdad, who greatly 



EDUCATION. 177 

admired "the enemy of his enemy" in Spain, and sent to him 
a musical clock, an elephant, and a key to the Holy Sepulcher, 
implying that pilgrims might safely visit Jerusalem. Western 
alliances were sought with the kings of the Asturias and the 
Scots, with OfTa of Mercia, and Egbert of Wessex, in England, 
elevating them in dignity and aiding them in the work of 
Christian civilization. 

III. The Civilizer. We can merely hint that he promoted 
agriculture, industry, commerce, and the happiness of domestic 
life, although the Germans clung to the rude plow and left 
trade almost entirely to Greeks, Arabs, and Jews. He con- 
structed roads, and undertook to connect the Rhine and the 
Danube by a canal. He aimed to bring the various peoples 
under one common law and education. ''His system of civil 
government will perpetuate his fame more surely than his most 
brilliant victories/' In the annual legislative assembly all 
classes were quite fairly represented. Bishops and abbots sat 
in it. Many of the laws pertained to morals and even house- 
keeping. Four times a year the bishops must see that their 
districts were visited and the wants of the people made known 
to the emperor, who noted down the modes of relief. The 
New Europe began to have its castles and increase its cities. 

IV. The Educator. He educated himself, and that was no 
small achievement. "The native speech of Charles was the 
old Teutonic. Latin, the literary tongue of the whole West, 
and still the native speech of many provinces, he spoke fluently 
as an acquired language ; Greek, the other universal and im- 
perial tongue, he understood when spoken, but could not speak 
it with ease." No French language can be said then to have 
existed. When dining at home a monk read to him some 
book — partly for the good of the Benedictine. He delighted to 
study the writings of Augustine, especially the " City of God." 
He felt qualified to enter into controversies of the time, 
especially against image-worship, and the Adoptionists. 

Whenever he met a scholar, a copyist, an author, a poet, 
whether Goth, Lombard, or Saxon, he made him his friend, 
and thus gathered about him a literary circle. When scourging 
the Lombards he sent word to Paul Warnefrid, ' ' I make war 
upon rebels not upon scholars," and brought him to Aix-la- 
Chapelle to act as chancellor, write chronicles, and aid in the 



178 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

work of popular education. Eginhard, the secretary of state, 
the reputed son-in-law, and the biographer of Charlemagne, 
was another of the scholarly monks. But the chief of all 
was Alcuin, a native of York, in England, a deacon of the 
cathedral there, a hard student in its fine library, and head- 
master of its school, to which many foreigners resorted. He 
belongs to that last race of scholars in Britain previous to the 
general onslaught of Norsemen, whom Alfred resisted. He 
had been a pupil of the venerable Bede. He has been de- 
scribed as "by far the most commanding genius of his age," 
and its most princely scholar. Traveling to gain knowledge, 
and meeting Charlemagne at Parma, in 781, he was invited to 
become the teacher of the emperor, his family, his courtiers, 
and his people. The warrior and the scholar entered upon a 
work of national education, which should appear wonderful to 
those who treat the Middle Ages with contempt, or charge the 
monks and clergy with all their darkness and demoralization. 
In this vast scheme, which was something better than a 
splendid failure, we find three kinds of schools: 1. The court 
school — Schola Palatum — held in whatever palace the imperial 
family might reside for a time. It seems to have been a sort 
of royal academy. It was intended to be the model for similar 
institutions throughout the empire, and thus reach the ruling 
classes in government and in society. To the court and town- 
council knowledge was to be dispensed by means of conversa- 
tions and lectures upon the seven liberal arts. Embraced in 
the Trivium were grammar, rhetoric, and logic ; in the Quad- 
rivinm were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music ; and 
as Alcuin was,, for that age, no mean expositor of Scripture 
and gatherer of patristic lore, we may be sure that theological 
science was not entirely forgotten. ' ' History presents to us 
few more striking spectacles than that of the great monarch 
of the West, surrounded by the princes and princesses of his 
family, and the chief personages of his brilliant court, all con- 
tend to sit as learners at the feet of their Anglo-Saxon pre- 
ceptor, Alcuin, in the school of the palace, at Aix-la-Cha- 
pelle. " Those who sought a higher knowledge were directed 
to the writings of Boethius, Cassiodorus, and the Fathers. 2. 
The convent schools established in the larger monasteries for 
the study of Latin and Holy Scripture in order to qualify men 



REVISERS OF SCRIPTURE. 



179 



to teach and preach. From them went out men who kept up 
some sort of intellectual fire and did noble missionary work 
through the next two hundred years.* 3. The cathedral 
schools in the cities and parish schools in the towns, for the 
gratuitous instruction of the poorer children. The education 
did not go far beyond the Lord's Prayer and the Creed. Of the 
success of this plan we know little more than that Bishop 
Theodulf of Orleans opened parochial schools in his diocese. 

V. The Revisers of Scripture. In the revival of literature it 
was found that the Latin manuscripts of the Bible and the 
Psalter needed revision, for errors had slipped in through the 
fingers of copyists. Purer copies were brought from England, 
Italy, and Greece. The emperor as patron, Alcuin as editor, 
and the monks as copyists, produced a fair supply of more 
accurate editions of all the sacred books for the principal 
churches and convents. But they failed to provide translations 
of the Bible. In the same way they applied their critical skill 
to such classical writings as they could obtain. As the work 
rose before their eyes in its magnitude, Charlemagne said, 
' ' Would that I had twelve clerks as learned as Jerome and 
Augustine." To which Alcuin replied, "The Creator of heaven 
and earth has had no more like these two ; yet you would 
have twelve!" 

The patron must soon be alone in this noble employment, 
for which his love increased to his last days, and just before his 
death he was engaged in comparing a Latin version of the Gos- 
pels with the Syriac translation and the original Greek. Alcuin 
grew weary of court life.f He was retired in 796 to the mon- 
astery of St. Martin, of Tours, which then had great wealth 

* Among those in France were the schools of Tours, St. Maur near Angers, 
Corbey near Amiens, Luxeuil, Metz, Fontenelle in Normandy, Aniane in Lan- 
guedoc, Orleans, Paris, Cluny (912), Chartres (1000). In Germany, Fulda, the 
oldest in Saxony (744), New Corbey in Westphalia (826), Cologne, and St. Gall 
in Switzerland. The universities of Paris, Bologna, and Pavia hardly grew out 
of the schools of Charlemagne. 

fHe seems to have been displeased with certain novelties which Clement 
the Scot (Irishman) introduced into the court-school. Eginhard says, "It hap- 
pened that along with some Breton merchants came two Irish Scots (Clement and 
John of Mailross), men of incomparable skill in learning, both profane and 
sacred, and landed on the coast of Gaul. They set out no merchandise for sale, 
but exhorted all comers to receive wisdom, saying, 'We have it to sell.' The 
people thought they were madmen, and told King Charles. He sent for them. 



l8o HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

and very disorderly inmates. Alcuin did not perfectly reform 
them. He enriched the library with books from England, and 
raised the school to great fame during the six remaining years 
of his life. It is said that he would not allow his pupils to read 
the "falsehoods of Virgil," in which he had once delighted, 
but he so taught truths that some of his students became emi- 
nent men in the next generation. He left behind him a mass 
of writings not much ventilated in our times, but his name is 
worthy of long remembrance. 

VI. The Churchman. With all his faults Charlemagne loved 
the Church of God. In his zeal for the faith he attempted to 
impose Christianity upon the conquered Saxons, in the hope 
that they could thus be brought to submission and peace. In 
the next chapter we shall notice his military mode of con- 
version and the missions he promoted. However he did his 
work it was done effectually, in a nominal sense. Those wild 
tribes began a new kind of life, and the rich fruits of it are 
seen in the times of Luther. At home Charlemagne was a 
reviver, if not a reformer, in the Church. He paid earnest 
attention to the services of worship, personally showing the 
choir how to sing and the lectors how to read the Scripture les- 
sons. He set Paul Warnefrid to writing homilies for the 
country pastors. He required preaching in the language of the 
people, to whom the Creed and the Lord's Prayer must be 
taught and explained. He let certain bishops and abbots know 
that their letters were not written in good style, and that they 
must learn both grammar and Scripture. It was his mistake 
to repress the liturgy of Ambrose, and enjoin the ritual of 
Gregory the Great. His few army chaplains must "preach, 
conciliate, bless, impose penance, celebrate mass, take care 
of the sick, anoint the dying, but carry no arms, nor shed any 
blood." Bishops must not be translated from one city to 
another, nor be voluntarily absent from their charges more than 
three weeks. He means something when he says that bishops, 
abbots, and abbesses are forbidden to keep fools, buffoons, 



and gave them a chance to dispense their learning." Clement taught learners 
of all ranks. John went to Pavia, and there opened a market for his wisdom. 
Of his success the Pavians make no audible report. Eginhard also says, 
"Almost the whole nation of the Scots, braving the dangers of the sea, came to 
settle in our country with a train of philosophers." 



REFORMS. l8l 

and jugglers, hawks and hounds, for their diversion. No fox- 
hunting clergy were wanted. Monks and clergy must not fre- 
quent taverns to drink. A monk must not be mutilated for 
failing in his rules. The churches must not be asylums for rob- 
bers and vagabonds. Tithes were exacted for the clergy, the 
poor, and church erection. He writes to the bishops. "We 
beseech you that the ministers of God's altar may adorn their 
ministry by good morals. ... A priest should be learned 
in Holy Scripture, and rightly believe and teach the faith of the 
Trinity." Benedict, of Aniane, a monk of great note and 
influence, was at the head of a commission appointed to reform 
all convents and bring the Columbanian monasteries under the 
older Benedictine rule. 

Was Charlemagne a successful man ? Did his best meas- 
ures secure any permanent benefits? The results do not 
appear to be commensurate with the efforts. This is a telling 
fact against that age. It silently points to barbarisms in society 
and corruptions in the Church, which a dreary volume could 
not fully expose. It testifies to a darkness which a hundred 
lamps could not expel. Yet the extent of the failure and the 
causes of it are often misstated. The blame is sometimes laid 
chiefly on the clergy ; let them bear their proper share of it. 
Some of them were very ignorant ; others indolent and steeped 
in their own vices ; some made a religion of trivial rites, and 
doubtless others "understood much better the use of a 
sword than that of a pen." But three other facts must be 
remembered : 

i. The empire was soon broken in sections, and each 
part was a field of strife and revolt. The Frank, the German, 
and the Italian could not agree. Three grandsons of Charle- 
magne signed the treaty of Verdun, in 843, and thus laid the 
foundations of three modern kingdoms. France was allotted 
to Charles the Bald, Italy to Lothaire, and Germany to Louis 
the Pious. Yet over all there was an emperor to preserve 
the old Roman theory of supervision. He and the pope 
were to be the two fatherly sovereigns of state and Church ; 
but they fell into deadly quarrels. Thus arose three kingdoms, 
each growing more distinct in character, interests, language, 
law, life, Church, and literature. Each produced its type of 
civilization. In many respects the Church in each was national. 



182 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

2. In that age the people looked to their rulers to promote 
reforms. It was not a time for popular movements, as the 
days of Luther came to be. Every crownless reformer must 
have a charter from his king. Queen Judith, the Guelf, who 
caused the threefold division of the empire, was not a nursing 
mother to the Church and its schools. Her own learning only 
shaped her intrigues. She turned her husband, Louis the 
Pious (814-840), from his good plans as a nurturing father 
of the Church. A student rather than a statesman, he was 
more occupied with priests than with warriors. He ordered 
parts of the Bible to be translated into German, and was 
glad to see the famous Anskar go as the great missionary to 
Scandinavia. But schools and reforms were of less moment 
to his sons than battles for real estate and crowns. And after 
them came the depravities of royal courts, and the ceaseless 
wars between kings, dukes, and feudal lords. 

3. The incursions of the Northmen. No sooner had the 
Germanic peoples south of Denmark become fairly settled in 
the lands they had conquered than they were assailed by the 
more Northern branch of the old Aryan family. The story is 
that Charlemagne was once at a feast far down on the Mediter- 
ranean at Narbonne, when some boats shot up into the harbor. 
"They are Jews coming to sell goods," said one; others 
guessed them to be British traders. "No," replied the emperor; 
"they bring not merchandise. Those ships are manned with 
most terrible enemies." He stepped to the window, and there 
stood in tears. "It is not for myself that I am weeping," said 
he, ' ' nor for any harm they can do me. But if they dare come 
now even to this shore, what evils will they bring on my suc- 
cessors?" This was no false alarm. Lothaire, of Italy, urged 
them to ravage the lands of his brothers, while he kept back 
the Saracens from his own borders. No wonder that many of 
the clergy gave up in despair or became warriors. Year after 
year, during the ninth century, the piratical vikings and sea- 
rovers pushed up the rivers, pillaged towns and burnt them, 
sacked monasteries and churches, until some coasts were visited 
and valleys wasted fifty times.* The French lost their defensive 



*Guizot repels the error that Charlemagne "accomplished nothing; that 
his empire, his laws, all his works perished with him." He was not merely a 
brilliant meteor. Freeman says: "We are too apt to suppose that his great 



THE NORTHMEN. 1 83 

courage, so often were they " stunned by the Northmen's ap- 
proach, subjugated by their fury." 

One effect of the Norse invasions was to give a new center 
to France and its history. Paris had been quite ignored for a. 
long time. It now was assailed by the Northmen. "It was 
the great siege of Paris in the ninth century which made Paris 
the chief among the cities of Gaul, and its count [Robert the 
Strong, the Maccabee of his country] the chief among the prin- 
ces of Gaul. ... It created the county, and then the 
kingdom." It became the center, the capital, the life, and soul 
of modern France, and the city of massacres and revolutions, 
mediaeval philosophy and theology, later fashion and liberal 
culture, sentimental literature and free-thought. Count Rob- 
ert — not the crusader, but the father of the Capets and the 
champion against wild heathenism — saw the Northmen pillage 
and burn Rouen, and attack Paris repeatedly, rifle its abbeys, 
burn one of its finest churches and spare three more only for a 
ransom, and slaughter its people until "the islets of the Seine 
were whitened with the bones of their victims." These were 
the terrible days of Regnar Lodbrog (840-860), and after him 
came Hasting, who slew Robert in a church near Angers. The 
count " died as he had lived, fighting for Gaul and Christendom 
against the heathen Dane,"* and the land mourned its loss. 
Besides King Alfred the Western Church seemed to have no 
other great defender on earth. The tone of the preachers grew 
still sadder as they compared the woes of the cities on every 
river to the woes of Jerusalem. Radbert paused in his argu- 
ments for transubstantiation and lifted his wail of sorrow for 
"the havoc of Paris and its holy places." In his commentary 
on Jeremiah he found the sympathy of the prophet and wrote : 
"Who could ever think that the pirates would touch the walls 

work was almost immediately undone amidst the dissensions of his grandsons. 
This arises from looking at him and his empire from a French instead of a Ger- 
man point of view." The political institutions, the rise of cities, and the 
missionary influence of Germany were largely due to him. Though his schools 
declined in France, yet they developed the intellectual vigor which is seen in 
certain theological controversies and in scholasticism. 
* "When he hoisted his standard black, 

Before him was battle, behind him was wrack, 
And he burned the churches — that heathen Dane — 
To light his band to their barks again." 

(Scott's "Harold the Dauntless"). 



1 84 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of Paris and burn the churches of Christ? Did ever any dweller 
on earth hear the like?" And still the like went on until the 
days of Rollo the Norman (911). 



NOTES. 

I. The Temporal Power of the Pope. Three stages of advance : 1. The 
Church of Rome came to possess certain lands in Italy, Sicily, and else- 
where, but not by the pretended "donation of Constantine." Gregory I 
claimed as the special "Patrimony of St. Peter," a duchy extending from 
Viterbo to Naples. In the Italian wars the Greeks offered him, for military 
services, all the lands which he won from the Lombards. 2. The donations 
of certain cities by Pipin and Charlemagne. 3. "The states of the Church," 
as designated on our maps, until 1870, when Victor Immanuel wrested 
them from Pius IX. They long furnished an army for the pope's defense. 

II. The Decretals, "one of the mightiest engines in the triumphs of the 
papacy." 1. The genuine (probably). They were decrees, letters, and 
replies to questions and appeals, sent forth by the bishops of Rome. A col- 
lection or digest of them was made about 560, by Dionysius Exiguus, the 
little wise monk who arranged our chronology for us on Christian principles. 
Another seems to have been formed by Bishop Isidore, of Seville, who died 
in 636. Neither of these ran farther back than about 384. To run them 
back to the apostles was a desideratum. 2. The false or " Pseudo-Isidorian 
Decretals." These filled the gap back to Clement of Rome, and supplied 
the names of several bishops not heard of elsewhere. The forger may have 
drawn somewhat from those early frauds, the Clementine Recognitions, and 
the Apostolic Constitutions. It is alleged that Pope Hadrian I, about 785, 
managed to produce this supplement to the collection of Isidore ; hence the 
saying that " Hadrian is the true creator of the papacy." The latter popes 
used them. The whole Church came to believe in them. In the twelfth 
century that strange, learned visionary, the monk Joachim, of Sicily, exposed 
the fraud, but this piece of history was classed with his wild heresies. Prot- 
estantism looked into them, and the Magdeburg Centuriators so ventilated 
them that the wisest Romanists have long admitted the forgery. 



MEDIAEVAL MISSIONS.— Si* types: ist, Celtic or Scot, 
Hm, 2d. R oman,Jm 3^, Frankish. ^^ . 4 th, Anglo- 
Saxon,^^'. 5th, German, ]_AA\. 6th, Greek, 1X23 - They 
sprang from the Church which had not been destroyed by the $ 
invading Nations,- and were promoted among-the Celtic, Teu- 
tonic and Slavonic races. 



^A/^A 

^ A A 



«S1 



,'M-i 






A. A .A./ 1 
AAA 



V A?9\,A 



rA?A 



a& 



tffr 



$# 



^Co^aVa 



>^x 



a 5! 3 ?£» 

-J5; ■ £-ET 



S3 m- 



Lll-i 





sr> o 2. vj o 




P- << » 




& O -• 2 SI 




• £ O 3 fL. 








1 ft 01 ftV 






rr 




5' 


old 
he 
near 
artel 
3 and 
Moor 


"^7 


01 


00 


O oJfei 



S>1 






Roman Bishops. — Innocent I, 402-17; Celestine, 423-32 ; .Leo 1, 440-61 ; Gre- 
gory I, 590-604; Hadrian I, 772-95; Leo :IIiy795-^Si6; Nicholas I, 858-67, 
CharSemagne, King of Franks, 77S, and Emperor, 800-14- His empire in- 
cluded nearly all the Continent on the map, except Denmark, Norway, Swe- 
den, Spain. Great Monasteries at Lerins, Tours,' Benedictine at Monte Ca- 
sino, St. Maur, Iona, Banchor, Bangor, Corbey, Fulda, Luxeui!,fCluny, ; Char- 
treuse, Citeaux, Bee. The. Holy Roman Empire (German) established 962V 






MISSIONS IN EUROPE. 1 85 



Chapter X. 

MISSIONS IN EUROPE. 

440-1050. 

The Churches of Italy and Gaul, when struck by the invad- 
ers, cast down but not destroyed, rose up and offered the 
Gospel to the conquerors. The conversion of the victors would 
be the triumph of the vanquished. The Church did no little to 
civilize her masters.* In the growth of the empire of the 
Franks we followed one line of her successes. But within the 
empire, and on the northern and eastern sides of it, there had 
been peoples as barbarous as ever were its founders. Their need 
of conversion prompted those missions, which went on like the 
movements' of armies for six centuries. Many of them were 
contemporary. We shall, in the main, keep the order of time 
if we treat them according to races, countries, and peculiarities, 
and thus classify them under six types: the Celtic, Roman, 
Frankish, English, German, and Greek, f 

I. The Celtic Missions. 

They began in the British Isles, not long after the Roman 
legions were called away (402-20) to fight the Germanic invad- 



* "Amidst all the fury and the abounding horrors of the barbarian con- 
quests we still find Christianity interposed as a shield between the wrath of the 
conqueror and the terrors of the conquered. From realm to realm, from city 
to city, we see the bishop marching with his clergy \e. g., St. Martin of Tours], 
singing psalms, addressing invocations, arresting the inundation, staying the 
plague. Sometimes he prays, sometimes he adjures, sometimes he offers the 
example of a holy martyrdom. And so he conquers his conquerors." (Merri- 
vale, Conv. of Northern Nations.) 

t These sketches must be limited to the greater movements by which nations 
were Christianized,' and to representative men. It is here said, once for all, 
that these men had many of the faults, as well as most of the virtues of theii 
times; that they employed the agencies then in use, all of them preaching, 
praying, and reading the Bible, but too many of them laying stress upon crosses, 
relics, external rites, and an erroneous ministration of the sacraments ; that some 
professed to work miracles, and to all miracles were ascribed by later writers, 
and that nearly every one of them had assistants and successors in their noble, 
selkdejvying work. 



1 86 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ers on the Continent, and never to return. The troops and 
camp-followers left not one certain sign of a school, or church, 
established by them in the military towns, which the Romans 
had held through four hundred years. The Islanders were 
mainly Celts whose ancestors had come in an early drift of 
Aryans from the Bactrian hills. The origin of the Chris- 
tian Church among them has no trustworthy record. "It was 
almost certainly from Gaul," perhaps in the days of Irenaeus. 
In exultant terms, if not mere rhetoric, Tertullian asserted 
"against the Jews" that "places in Britain, not yet visited by 
the Romans, were subjected to Christ." The long third century 
passed, and His servants there left us no clear voice of preacher, 
singer, or martyr. A doubt hangs over that brightest name, 
St. Alban, who, as a pagan, sheltered a Christian missionary 
from persecutors (305 ?) : learned the Gospel, and was bap- 
tized. A few days later he saw the soldiers coming to the 
house, put on the teacher's cloak, gave himself into their hands, 
and was condemned to die as Britain's first-named martyr. 

" Self-offered victim, for his friend he died, 
And for the Faith." 

Rather than dwell upon the merest legends, we may admit that 
from the close of the second century there was a British Church, 
with its chapels in villages of peasants ; its cells and barefoot 
Culdees among the hunters of the North ; its more cultured 
pastors in such towns as Chester and Glastonbury: its happy 
memories of Constantius Chlorus, who would not enforce the 
savage edicts of Diocletian; its bishops of London, York, and 
Lincoln at the Council of Aries (314), very grateful to Constan- 
tine for paying their traveling expenses ; three other bishops at 
Rimini (359) equally poor and grateful for like favors; its slow 
Victories over the romantic but savage paganism of Druid bards 
and priests, and its first-known book, written in Latin by 
Bishop Fastidius, of London, about 420, on the Christian Life. 
Pelagianism sorely tried the lore and logic of its pastors, and 
they sent to Gaul for help. Germanus, once a lawyer but now 
Bishop of Auxerre, and Lupus, * whom Attila had not yet im- 
pressed, came over about 429, and we begin to hear of ' ' field- 
meetings " quite worthy of Wesley's days. "They preached 

*He was addressed by Sidonius of Clermont as " a bishop of bishops;" a 
title not yet monopolized by the Roman prelates. 



EARLY BRITISH CHURCH— THE SAXON INVASION. 187 

in churches, and even in streets and fields, and in the open 
country, to the great encouragement of the faithful." They 
met the Pelagians for a discussion before a vast assembly, at 
St. Albans. Old writers say that "on one side was Divine 
authority: on the other was human assurance." In the high 
debate the errorists were not only worsted in argument, but 
"the exulting people could hardly keep their hands off them." 
Other triumphs of Germanus appear in legends of the Halle- 
lujah Victory. 

The Romans were gone, and the Britons entered the for- 
saken homes and towns. They lived proudly in frescoed houses 
and in villas adorned with tesselated pavements, statues of 
marble and bronze, vases of terra cotta, and Latin books not 
readable by them. They strolled in gardens and orchards into 
which the Romans had first acclimated the rose, the grape, the 
apple, cherry, pear, and plum. But this grandeur was brief, 
since they were rich enough to be plundered, and their spirit 
and art of defense were gone. Upon them came the northern 
Picts, rushing in droves over the Roman walls, and the pirating 
Scots ( Irish) ravaging the coasts of Wales. Deep must have 
been the despair of the Britons, if they were willing to invite 
and trust the Saxons to aid them. A Roman poet, who could 
not predict the final outcome of these Germanic savages, de- 
scribed them as "the sea-wolves that live on the plunder of the 
world." They had already made little settlements in Britain, 
and there their kinsfolk, the Angles (English) seem to have 
begun their New England. Whatever be the fact about Hen- 
gist and Horsa, their sailing from Jutland in 449, and driving 
back the Picts and Scots, it is clear that the Angles and Saxons 
turned their forces upon the Britons and made it a field of 
robbery and slaughter. In the long war and woe the native 
people were slain, reduced to serfage, or driven into the. west- 
ern marshes and mountains. Wherever the invaders founded 
kingdoms they outdid the Goths in their violence to the Chris- 
tians ; and yet these importers of Odinism were the fathers of 
English nationality, language, law, and liberty. ' ' Nowhere else 
in Western Europe were the existing men and institutions so 
utterly swept away." 

A remnant of the early British Church was left in Wales and 
northward probably as far as the Clyde. If Potitus, the reputed 



1 88 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

grandfather of St. Patrick, was an active presbyter near Dumbar- 
ton, he may have been favored by the Roman garrison. With 
Paul he might say, "I am a Roman citizen." Roman names 
run in his family, for it is not certain that his renowned grand- 
son was first called Succat, and then Patricius. The lowland 
Picts, while the Romans held them quiet, seem to have lent an 
ear to the missionary Ninian (400-432), to whom are ascribed 
miracles, large successes, and the rearing of the white stone 
church (Whithern) in Southern Galloway. It seems credible 
that, in 431, the Roman primate, Celestine, sent Palladius to 
act as the bishop "to the Scots believing in Christ:" the Scots 
being in Ireland and in Argyle. Those scattered believers had 
no prelate over them. He failed in Ireland ; perhaps his prel- 
acy was not acceptable. There are traditions of his later labors 
in the present Scotland. In the best and oldest Irish manu- 
script yet known,* he is said to have been "sent by Pope Celes- 
tine with a Gospel for Patrick, to preach it to the Irish." This 
may indicate that " the Apostle of Ireland" had already entered 
voluntarily upon his mission. 

The eminent leader in Celtic missions was Patrick, born 
probably at Alcluid, near the present Kilpatrick, on the Clyde, 
in Scotland, f The best account is that his grandfather Potitus 
was a presbyter, his father Calpurnius a deacon, and his mother 
Conchessa may have been related to St. Martin of Tours. At 
the age of sixteen, when a merry, careless boy in the fields, 
he was carried by pirates to Ireland, where he was for six years 
a slave tending sheep on the lonely hill-sides of Down. The 
holy lessons of childhood came to remembrance. ' ' I frequently 
rose to prayer in the woods before daylight, in snow, and frost, 
and rain. And there the Lord opened my unbelieving mind, 
so that, even late, I thought upon my sins, and my whole heart 
was turned to the Lord my God, who looked down on my 
low condition, pitied my youth and ignorance, and cherished 



*Now published. Dublin, 1874-5. 

fHis dates and birthplace have been variously fixed according to certain 
theories. One view is that he was born in 372, sent by Celestine to Ireland in 
432, and there died between 465 and 493. Dr. Todd favors the Scottish birth- 
place, and the later dates, making his mission begin between 440 and 450. Dr. 
Killen has more recently attempted to show that he was born in Northern Gaul, 
in ^J^i began his Irish mission in 405, and died 465. (Old Catholic Church, 
1871, pp. 311, 312.) 



ST. PATRICK IN IRELAND. 1 89 

me as a father would a son." One can see that his religion 
was not ritual, but spiritual ; not a matter of forms, but of faith ; 
not penance, but repentance ; not a mere reform of conduct, 
but the renewal of the soul. Escaping from bondage, he was 
again with his parents, who questioned the import of a dream 
in which he thought he heard the voice of the Irish calling 
him: "We entreat thee, come and walk among us." He re- 
solved to go. His relatives tried in vain to cool his enthusiasm. 

His own account of himself has not one word about being 
at Rome, nor his appointment by the pope to succeed Palladius, 
nor any long years of study. In his old age he writes (we 
blend two accounts), "I, Patrick, a sinner, a very rustic, un- 
learned, and the least of all the faithful, by many persons held 
in contempt, acknowledge that I have been appointed a bishop 
in Ireland. I most certainly believe that it is the gift of God 
that I am what I am, and so I dwell among barbarians, a pros- 
elyte and exile for the love of God." To speak thus, "I am 
constrained by my zeal for God and for the truth of Christ, 
which stimulated me through a love of my neighbors and [spir- 
itual] sons, for whom I have given up my country and parents, 
and even my life itself to death, if I be worthy. I have vowed 
to my God to teach the nations." If Rome had sent him he 
surely would have said so. What we know is that he was 
well versed in Scripture, that he preached in his homely way 
to the heart, and devoted the rest of his life to the Irish, begin- 
ning his missionary work there perhaps as early as 425, perhaps 
not until twenty years later. He began with his old, angry 
master, and so won him to the faith, that he gave to the mis- 
sionaries the land on which rose the "barn of Patrick," and 
later a famous church. 

Many were his preaching tours through the land, and many 
the perils from the Druids and the pagan chiefs. Might made 
right among the clansmen whose wrath was often roused by the 
beat of a drum, which called the natives out of their huts to 
listen to " the Apostle of Ireland." He adapted himself to the 
people, holding up a shamrock leaf to illustrate "the Three in 
One," and dealing gently with customs which then seemed 
harmless, but grew into such superstitions as wakes, holy wells, 
and Beltane fires. One aim was to convert the chiefs, and the 
kings of the mythical histories. Wherever there was to be a 



I90 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

crowd at the Celtic games, or the Druid festivals, or the league 
of clans, he was likely to appear, and his fine physique, good 
address, honest face, earnest soul, ringing voice, wit, wisdom, 
common sense, bold exposures of popular sins, direct appeals 
to the conscience, ready use of Scripture, and his spiritual 
fervor, had their effect upon masses of people. For his suc- 
cess he seems to have relied upon the truth of the Divine 
Word, the attributes of God, and the presence of Christ in 
the hearts of preacher and people. While rejecting the mir- 
acles and legends that have grown about him, like poison 
ivies about an oak, we may believe that he and his singing 
companions won honorable triumphs at Tara, where the chief 
northern king was brought to the faith, and that many were 
baptized. Thereafter he was no court-bishop, nor layer of tithes 
upon the people. His preaching tours were made through the 
broad country whose four corners now are Belfast, Dublin, Gal- 
way, and Donegal. He was long ago said to have founded 
three hundred and sixty-five churches, and placed over them 
three hundred and sixty-five bishops. Such estimates are 
merely general. The Church at Armagh became the metropol- 
itan at a later day. Some of his conferences and synods of the 
clergy have been magnified into legislative councils of vast 
importance. His labors probably extended through fifty or 
sixty years. He seems to have died at his favorite residence, 
near the first church he planted. 

No other human name has ever been stamped so deeply 
upon Ireland as that of St. Patrick. It goes with her children 
wherever they roam through the world. It has recently be- 
come more and more fully rescued from myth and legend, 
prelacy and papacy. There was no such papal system in the 
fifth century as he was long made to represent. He appears 
as the superintendent of a vast work which resulted in the 
revival of the few Christians already there, in the founding 
of Churches, convents, and schools, and in the fresh stimulus 
given to missions. "The Church of St. Patrick" was not 
precisely like any denominational Church of our time in its 
mode of government. It was long in adopting the later polity 
of Rome. We read that " Ireland was full of village bishops," 
and that there were "bishops without sees — wandering bishops." 
Far down in the twelfth century St. Bernard, the restorer of 



FINIAN'S PSALTER. 



I 9 I 



preaching in France, thought it an error that "every particular 
church in Ireland should have its particular bishop." Yet 
Ireland had to submit to the invasions of the twelfth century 
before its presbyterial polity entirely gave way to prelacy. It 
was long under the Culdee system which we find in Scotland. 
The glory of the Ancient Celtic Church is that she did not 
employ her mind in the invention of new modes of Church 
government, but threw her best life into missions.* 

The next eminent Celtic missionary was Columba, born in 
521, of royal blood, among the wildest of the Donegal Mount- 
ains. By his time the Irish Church had made great advances. 
He was educated in a Christian home, a Culdee cell, and in 
some of the best monasteries. He was ordained a presbyter, 
and began his work in the manner of the age. On a hill cov- 
ered with oaks he made his cell, and this grew into a convent, 
around which slowly rose the city of Derry. He founded other 
monasteries, and was a Celtic Benedict before the Nursian had 
matured his rule. He seems to have promoted learning in 
Ireland. How he came to leave it we are thus told by his 
biographer, Adamnan, who wrote in the next century. He 
borrowed the Psalter of his teacher, St. Finian, and cautiously 
made a copy of it. But the saint detected him, and claimed 
the copy, at which Columba was highly indignant. The dis- 
putants agreed to refer the case to King Diarmad, at Tara. 
He sagely decided that "as to every cow belongs her calf, so 
to every book belongs its copy." Columba, disgusted with 
this use of a Celtic proverb, was still more angry. Not long 
after, when some young courtiers were at a game of hurling 
on the green, a prince of Connaught slew one of the party in 
a quarrel, and ran for sanctuary to Columba, who was with 
King Diarmad, and was willing to grant the right of asylum. 
But the king ordered the young prince, his hostage at the time, 
to be dragged away and put to death for having rashly intruded 
into the royal presence, as if a king were more sacred than a 

* "While the vigor of Christianity in Italy and Gaul and Spain was ex- 
hausted (?) in a bare struggle for life, Ireland, which remained unscourged by 
invaders, drew from its conversion an energy such as it has never known since. 
Christianity had been received there with a burst of popular enthusiasm, and 
letters and arts sprang up rapidly in its train. The science and Biblical knowl- 
edge which fled from the Continent took refuge in famous schools which made 
Durrow and Armagh the universities of the West." (Green's Hist. England.) 



192 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

priest. This was such an inhuman outrage that Columba's 
wrath flamed higher than ever. He barely escaped from the 
rude court at Tara, went to his own clan, and his story roused 
the men of Donegal to arms, and in great battle they won the 
victory.* He and Diarmad made peace; but his conscience 
accused him of causing so much bloodshed. At a synod in 
Meath, nearly all the brethren, except Finian, whose love for 
his pupil returned, agreed that "the man of blood" ought to 
quit his country, and from the heathen win as many souls as 
had perished in the strife. This story not unreasonably ac- 
counts for the important turn in Columba's life. 

In 563 twelve men were rowing a boat northward, not will- 
ing to rest until their native Ireland was out of sight. They 
landed upon the little rocky Iona, three miles long and one 
mile wide, a barren spot which became an "isle of saints," 
and the center of wide -reaching missions. There Columba 
began his work of thirty-four years. The results of the work 
are better known than the workman. 1. The Picts and Scots 
of Scotland were converted, at least nominally. Tall, vigorous, 
athletic, attractive by his joyous face and genial manners, he 
sped through forests and over mountains, now heartily wel- 
comed by one chief, and again shut out of the cabin of another ; 
now helping some little band of fugitives out of their distresses, 
and again standing on a rock, preaching and singing to a crowd 
with a voice that rang among the hills far away, and brought 
heathen to the door of their huts, wondering whence it came. 
2. Whether the reviver or the father of the Culdee system, 
he made it the prominent feature of the early Scottish Church. 



* Far less serious causes often threw the petty kings and jealous clans of 
Ireland into war. Their feuds make confusion in the history for centuries. 
It has been said that "the secret of its long anarchy and weakness lies in the 
fact that it was Christianized without being civilized." It long needed a system 
of law, municipal institutions, the dissolution of clanship, popular intelligence, 
and the unity of its people. So did the Germanic peoples elsewhere. But the 
Celtic tribes never organized a powerful, central, enduring government, not even 
in Gaul, nor in Wales. The Irish and the Scotch Highlanders retained many of 
the antagonisms of clanship after they were conquered by a more unifying race, 
and the Church was thus hindered from producing a better civil life. Neverthe- 
less the people, "who could not read and had no good roads," knew a great deal 
without reading, and went devoutly to church over bad roads; and the learned 
few made Ireland so famous that in the darker centuries of Germanic develop- 
ment it enjoyed perhaps the purest spiritual light in Christendom. 



THE BARDS. 



193 



He being but a presbyter, no one cared to be much more than 
that, until later centuries. The monks need not be celibates, 
though no women were allowed in the monasteries intended for 
men. The Culdees (CiiildicJi), "the men of the cell," had a 
passion for building a hut in some wild place, and going thence 
to teach and preach, or drawing the people there to hear them. 
The kil was often the germ of a convent, or kirk ; farms were 
cleared ; then rose such a town as Kilkerran (the Church of 
Ciaran, an early missionary), or Kirkcudbright (Cuthbert's 
Church). Culdee monasteries grew thick in the land, and stood 
even on the Hebrides and Orkney Islands. The Word of God 
was the supreme authority among them, and they were long 
quite free from the worst errors that were creeping into the 
Church of Rome. 

" Pure Culdees 

Were Albyn's earliest priests of God, 
Ere yet an island of the seas 

By foot of Saxon monk was trod." 

3. In this Culdee system the unity of the early Church in 
Scotland and Ireland was long preserved. Councils were held. 
At one of them a dispute between kings was settled ; and a 
complaint against the Celtic bards was' warmly discussed, not 
because many of them were Druids, but because the chiefs of 
the clans loudly demanded their repression. The bards could 
sing one hero into disgrace, or lampoon him into the purchase 
of their good will. They could lift another into great popular- 
ity if he paid them well. Columba thought it a serious affair to 
array law against song. Fond of poetry, a poet and a singer 
himself, he proposed that the order should be pruned, its satirists 
restrained, its geniuses encouraged ; and thus the profession was 
saved, for good or ill. That Church was not intolerant. 4. 
Iona became one of the brightest lights of Europe in an age 
that was growing darker. Its monastery had a better rule than 
that of Benedict ; for it allowed more liberty, and was more 
devoted to elevating studies and to missionary work. In other 
respects they were quite similar. When Dr. Johnson, the literary 
lion of London, visited the ruins in 1773 he said : "We are now 
treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of 
the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving bar- 
barians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of 

13 



194 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

religion. . . . That man is little to be envied whose patri- 
otism would not gain force upon the plains of Marathon, or 
whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona." 
No one can tell what numbers of missionaries went out from it, 
and from the many seminaries modeled after it — such as those 
at Abernethy, St. Andrews, Dunkeld, and Lindisfarne. "Each 
of these institutions was a seat of learning,* a center whence 
radiated light and refinement. Its members rejoiced in their 
mission, weaned not in their vocation, sought out the scattered 
hamlets in the lonely glen or dreary moor, taught them the 
Gospel of the kingdom, exacted no tithes, and enjoined nei- 
ther mass nor penance, confession nor purgatory. . . . They 
claimed no priestly power over the consciences and destiny 
of men. Their theology was sound." Columba, the presbyter 
and abbot, had the superintendence over the whole Caledonian 
Church. He ordained bishops, who appear to have been sim- 
ply presbyters, and so were their successors until Culdeeism 
gave way to prelacy in the twelfth century. 

In his old age, ceasing from his wide missionary tours, Co- 
lumba was still boatman, grinder of corn in the handmill, phy- 
sician, farmer, and student of his Bible. One Saturday in 
June, 597, he looked at the stores in the barn, the grain in 
the fields, the little black cattle on the downs, thanking the 
Lord that the brethren would have their supplies after he was 
gone ; he asked a blessing upon his great monastery, turned 
into his own wattled hut, and went on transcribing a psalm. 
He wrote, ' ' They who seek the Lord shall not want any good 
thing," and then said to a brother monk: "That fills the page, 
and I '11 stop ; the next words, ' Come, ye children, hearken 
unto me,' belong rather to my successor than to myself." He 
went to vespers, and then to his hut ; he heard the bell ring 
out the hours of prayer through the night; at matins he was 
kneeling at the altar in the chapel, whence the brothers bore 
him away speechless, and trying to lift his hand to bless them 
once more. His eternal day of rest had dawned. They buried 
his body in the rock, and kings came to think it an honor to 
be laid to rest by Columba's tomb, until cities contended for 



*Iona came to have one of the most famous libraries of Europe, and pro- 
moted Greek and Latin, as well as Biblical studies. It drew students from for- 
eign lands. Its earliest rivals were Banchor in Ireland, and Bangor in Wales. 



COLUMBAN'S RULE. 195 

his remains to make holier their cathedrals. He died the very 
year that Augustine landed in Kent and began his work among 
the Anglo-Saxons. Their followers worked towards each other, 
and met in Northern Britain. Will the Culdee system, or the 
Roman, win the day at Whitby? 

The third leader in Celtic missions was Columban (559-615), 
one of a great troop who blended "the ardor of Christian zeal 
with a love of traveling and adventure," and struck away from 
their Culdee cells to preach the Gospel among the heathen 
tribes of the Continent. Patrick had been scarcely a century in 
his grave when "Irish Christianity flung itself with a fiery zeal 
into battle with the mass of heathenism which was rolling in 
upon the Christian world.'' To have noble Leinster blood in 
his veins was nothing to Columban. He preferred the studies 
of rhetoric, geometry, and Scripture in the convent at Lough 
Erne, and his work of commenting on the Psalms at the Irish 
Bangor, until the love of Christ brought into his heart a pity 
for the wild Germans. In 589, at the age of thirty, he and 
twelve companions sailed over to the Anglo-Saxons, who gave 
him only a deaf ear ; and we find him in Burgundy, where a 
grandson of Clovis was more friendly. In the Vosgean forests 
and mountains, where wolves had howled since Attila's time, 
and pagan Suevi hunted them, he pitched his tent on the ruins 
of Annegray, and there reared a monastery of stones which 
the Romans had cut. Then he built another at Luxeuil, 
and a third at Fontaines. These were filled with monks and 
refugees from the wars. Fields were cleared, and the reapers 
sang as they bound the sheaves of wheat. Preachers were 
gathering spiritual harvests. By hundreds the people, for 
leagues around these centers of culture, came to learn the arts 
of more civilized life, and they were willing to listen to sermons 
and conversations, or to become members of the fraternity. 

The monastic rule of Columban was severer than those of 
Columba and Benedict. He wished to reform the monks of 
Gaul by engaging them in farm work, in the copying of manu- 
scripts, and in the minutest acts of the ritual. Hard was the 
penance for the brother who failed to say grace before meals, 
or respond with the "Amen," or sign his cup with the cross, 
or who talked too loud, or coughed, or stared about, during 
the services. Yet he attracted men, and said to them, "Do 



196 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

not dig all round the vineyard, and leave it full of brambles. 
True piety does not reside in the humility of the body, but in 
that of the heart. Do not merely read and talk of the virtues, 
but practice them. Let us live in Christ, that Christ may live 
in us." Often was he in the woods reading the holy Word, 
and among the growing villages preaching it. In the sermons 
of his class of men there was no literary finish, no effort to 
speak finely; the preacher went to the facts. "He feared not 
repetitions, familiarity, nor even rudeness. He spoke briefly, 
and began anew each morning. It is not sacred eloquence, it 
is religious power.'" 

Columban went on in his work, not caring to agree with Ro- 
man customs about tonsure and Easter, and "casting the divine 
fire on all sides without troubling himself about the conflagra- 
tion." The Frankish clergy sought to bring him to terms. To 
their synod he wrote, ' 1 1 came among you as a stranger in 
the name of our common Lord. I beseech you, for his sake, 
let me live quietly in these woods beside the graves of my 
seventeen departed brethren. Let Gaul receive unto her bosom 
all who, if they deserve it, will meet in one heaven. Choose 
ye which rule about Easter ye prefer, but let us not quarrel, 
lest our enemies rejoice in our strifes. We are members of 
one body." 

A worse storm than this blew from the Burgundian court, 
when he acted the part of John the Baptist against Herod and 
Herodias. The king, Thierri, had lost the old Teutonic virtues, 
and become a libertine, and yet he admired the bold Abbot of 
Luxeuil. On one of his visits there he was sternly rebuked for 
his licentiousness ; he quailed before the saint, and promised to 
reform by taking a lawful wife as a true queen. So he might 
have done, but, says the chronicler, ' ' the old serpent glided 
into the soul of Brunehaut, who was a second Jezebel," and 
who could not bear to be overshadowed by a new queen. She 
became violent. Columban came to the palace, tried reason, 
and then boldly denounced the sins of the court. A sharp 
contest was begun, in which the Celtic temper and the results 
were not in harmony with the miracles ascribed to him. He 
was expelled from Burgundy, but left in it those famous mon- 
asteries which were widely imitated in central Europe, and which 
observed the Celtic rule until the last davs of Charlemagne. 



COLUMBAN IN SWITZERLAND— IRISH MISSIONARIES. 1 97 

We find Columban and Gallus among the fierce tribes of 
Switzerland, preaching from Basle to Zurich, where no civiliza- 
tion yet was known. Their method was not the gentlest. 
Gallus set fire to the wooden temples and flung the idols into 
the lake. The monkish story is that Columban came upon a 
band of wild Suevi, when about to offer sacrifice, and pour 
libations to Wodin from a huge vat of beer. He breathed over 
the vat, it burst, and the soil drank the foaming beverage. 
Then the heathen rose in wrath, and no miracle saved the 
missionaries from flight. On the shores of Lake Constance 
they happily found a priest named Willimar, who could point 
to the ruins of churches and castles which the new races had 
destroyed. On one of these they built a monastery. They 
won back the fields to culture, planted orchards, and thus 
founded the modern city of Bregentz. They led back to the 
faith many people who had once been baptized, and converted 
their pagan masters. 

Gallus established the monastery of St. Gall, afterward re- 
nowned for its studies, illuminated manuscripts, and fine library. 
Columban went southward, and built the monastery of Bobbio, 
where grew up the town so notable in Waldensian history. 
He was invited back to Luxeuil, but spent his remaining 
days in literary labors, dying there in 615, and leaving to the 
north-west of him a broad belt of the Continent, from Iona to 
Italy, soon to be well planted with Celtic Christianity. For he 
had helped to set in motion an army of missionary monks, 
who are found through a century in all the new Europe. 
They are on the Rhine and in Swabia. One Irish monk cries 
aloud in the Black Forest. Kilian of Iona preaches in Fran- 
conia, and the unlawful wife of a converted chief is the cause 
of his martyrdom. Columban had kindled a sacred fire in the 
Gallic Church, and we shall soon see her holy torches in the 
Frankish missions. 

"For a time it seemed as if the course of the world's history 
was to be changed, as if Celtic and not Latin Christianity was 
to mold the destinies of the Churches of the West. It was, 
possibly, the progress of the Irish Columban, at her very doors, 
which roused into new life for a time the energies of Rome, 
and spurred Gregory to attempt the conversion of the English 
in Britain." 



I98 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



II. The Roman Mission in England. 

Pope Gregory did not forget the " non Angli sed Angeli," 
whose people were not angels, but Angles, when they drove the 
old British Church into the Welsh mountains. There she grew 
in vigor, but she could do nothing with her savage conquerors. 
The Saxons now had their little kingdoms, but no culture, no 
national unity. They had kept their paganism through one 
hundred and forty years. ' ' The new England was a heathen 
country. The religion of Wodin and Thunder triumphed over 
the religion of Christ. Elsewhere the Christian priesthood 
served as mediators between the barbarian and the conquered. 
Here the rage of the conquerors burnt fiercest against the 
clergy. River, and homestead, and boundary, the very days 
of the week, bore the names of the new gods who displaced 
Christ." Yet the warrior was settling down into a farmer, and 
the landless churl had his home in the gardens of old Roman 
villas, whose ruins were yet undisturbed by antiquarians. 

There had been some preparation for the return of Chris- 
tianity. King Ethelbert of Kent was Bretwalda, or the over- 
lord, of the kingdoms south of the Humber. His good wife 
Bertha was a Frankish princess, and a Christian. She had 
brought over her chaplain, Luidhard, to whom was granted a 
little old church outside the walls of Canterbury. The English 
were not likely to enter it for a Latin service, for Ethelbert 
went on in the way of his Teuton fathers. In 597 he learned 
that a band of monks were unlading their boat on the gravel 
where Hengist is said to have landed. He and his thanes went 
down to meet them. Their leader was Augustine, sent from 
Rome by Bishop Gregory.* A Gallic interpreter gave some 
clear meaning to the first parleyings, and a day was set for a 
further hearing. To be safe from all spells of magic, the king 
would meet them in the open air. The conference was a great 
affair. Under an oak the royal "son of the ash-tree" sat with 
his wild chiefs about him. Augustine, studious of imposing 



*The five great landings in English history are those of Julius Caesar, B. C. 55, 
allying Britain to the civilized world : Hengist, A. D. 449, marking the entrance 
of the original English: Augustine, 597, who brought over the Roman type 
of Christianity : William the Conqueror, 1066, who established the Norman 
feudalism: and William Third, 1668, who gave Great Britain a free Constitution. 



AUGUSTINE— ACCOMMODATION. 199 

effect, came with his monks in solemn procession, well robed, 
bearing a silver cross and a painting of the Savior, and chant- 
ing a litany. The stately leader, "head and shoulders taller 
than any one else," set forth his creed and his intentions. The 
king, doubtless affected by the grand display, with English fair- 
ness made answer thus : "Your words are plausible, and so are 
your promises : but they are new to me, and doubtful : I can 
not yet give up the customs of my race. As you are strangers 
from afar, and seem to be honest, you shall be safe from harm, 
shall receive our hospitality, and shall be free to make all the 
converts you can to your faith." 

The missionaries were soon marching into Canterbury to 
the music of Gregory's chant, "Take from this city, O Lord, 
thy wrath ;" and from that hour the chief royal town of Angle- 
land became the first center of Latin Christianity in Britain. 
Rome had come back, not with her legions, but with her 
language, her ecclesiasticism, and her prelatic system. "The 
civilization, art, letters, which had fled before the sword of the 
English conquest, returned with the Christian faith." 

Not a Culdee cell, but a queen's chapel, and a royal court, 
was the center of operations, and when Ethelbert was baptized* 
the new faith was made popular. The conversion of Ethelbert 
ranks with those of Constantine and Clovis, in its vast conse- 
quences. The Witan (wise council) voted the nation to be 
Christian. Augustine went to Aries, met the Frankish prelates, 
and returned an archbishop. Before his first Saxon Christmas 
he reported that more than ten thousand Kentish men had been 
baptized in the river Swale. The English Church was now 
fairly upon its great career. From one kingdom to another it 
slowly worked its way, with many reverses, yet many victories. 
Its advances were largely affected by the overlordship, won 
successively by different kings, f It was built on the Roman 
model, and soon had collisions with the Celtic Church of Wales 
and Scotland. We notice only the general principles, move- 
ments, and results. 

I. The principle of Accommodation. Augustine had been too 
much of a monk to grow into a practical, wise, independent 

*June I, 597; June 7, 597, Columba died, ending "the noblest missionary 
career ever accomplished in Britain." (Bright, Early English Church History. 
1878. pp. 50, 51.) tNote V. 



200 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

pastor. He put many questions to Bishop Gregory of Rome, 
and ''some of them," says Bright, "give the notion of a 
mind cramped by long seclusion, and somewhat helpless when 
set to act in a wide sphere." Among the weightier matters 
Gregory advises him to collect a ritual from the best usages of 
Rome, Gaul, and other Churches, not adhering blindly to the 
Roman form, "for we ought not to love things for the sake 
of places, but places for the sake of things ;" also to force none 
to be Christians, for "he who is brought to the font by coer- 
cion is likely to relapse ;" to banish idolatry, but spare pagan 
temples, purify them with holy water, deposit in them such 
relics as had been sent from Rome, and there hold festivals on 
the old pagan holidays. The effort was to Christianize too 
many heathen customs ; the result was to paganize too many 
Christian rites. So we find "old heathen spells retained with 
Christ's name in them, . . . and pagan superstitions linked 
to Christian holy-tides." Augustine died about 605, leaving 
the prelatic system firmly established. Thus far the relations 
of the strictly English Church with Gregory show an origin 
from the Roman, and not a continuity of the old British 
Church. To the one she conformed, with the other she failed 
to secure an early alliance. 

II. The Conference with representatives of the old British 
Church. The Welsh seem to have had at least seven bishops 
of their simple order (superintendent presbyters), and Dinoth, 
the abbot of Bangor. Between them and the Roman band 
there was a realm of heathenism to be Christianized. Why not 
unite Celt and Roman in the work ? King Ethelred favored a 
union of efforts. But how settle differences which then "ap- 
peared, even to the strongest and most spiritual minds, far 
graver than charity can allow them to be in our time."* The 
Roman Easter was kept on a Sunday later than the Jewish 
Passover-day; the Celtic' on a lunar Sunday, which some- 
times fell on the Jewish day ; the Roman tonsure was coronal, 
or circular ; the Celtic frontal extending from ear to ear ; and 
there was some now unknown difference in the rite of baptism ; 



* Goldwin Smith. These differences hardly prove the Greek origin of the 
old British Church. If Christianity was in the British Isles before the year 250, 
it went thither before there was much divergence between the Greek and Roman 
Christians. The Roman Church was virtually Greek for about two centuries. 



MISSION IN NORTHUMBRIA. 201 

probably the Celts objected to trine immersion and chrism. 
Augustine wished the Britons to come under his jurisdiction, 
but they felt the dignity of their Church as the oldest in Britain. 
They ventured into the land of the West-Saxon robbers, to 
confer with the Roman-English bishop, who had to risk being 
plundered by "the ceaseless fighter, Ceolwolf." The parties 
met (602-3) near the Severn, on a spot since called Augustine's 
Oak. The story is that an aged hermit told the Celts, "If 
Augustine be a man of God, follow him." "How shall we 
know?" "If he be meek and lowly like Christ; if he rise to 
meet you when you approach, then hear him ; if not, then 
return upon him his contempt, for you are the more numerous 
body." Augustine did not rise, and so the conference began 
with bad temper and ended with ill threats. Augustine said, 
"If you will not accept peace with brethren you shall have war 
from enemies ; if you will not preach the way of life to the 
English, you will be punished with death by English hands." 
Bede says that this prophecy was soon fulfilled when Ethelfrid 
the Fierce, the king of Northumbria, laid siege to Chester, saw 
King Brocmail supported by hundreds of praying monks, and 
fell upon them, so that more than a thousand of them are 
said to have been killed. The Welsh Church maintained its 
independence "with a dash of the truest Protestant spirit" for 
one hundred and fifty years.* 

III. The Mission in Northumbria. This realm came into the 
hands of the great Edwin of Deira (617-633), whose northern 
town still bears his name — Edinburgh. With him began the 
proverb, ' ' A woman with her babe might walk scatheless from 
sea to sea in Edwin's day." Southward he was overlord of all 
the English except the Kentish men, and he sought their 
alliance by wedding Ethelberga, good Queen Bertha's child. 
As he was still a pagan, he had to make some special pledges. 
She gave him her hand on condition that she might retain her 
faith in her heart and home. On this much was to turn for the 



*Bede, near 730, writing of the Welsh Cadwalla, said rather bitterly, "It 
is to this day the custom of the Britons not to pay any respect to the faith of 
the English, nor to correspond with them any more than with Pagans." (Eccl. 
Hist, ii, 20.) As oppression maketh a wise man mad, it was likely to cause the 
Britons to "cleanse thoroughly the plates and cups from which Saxons fed." 
Aldhelm ascribes this cleansing not to refinement, but to aversion. 



202 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

furtherance of the Gospel.* Deira might be free from the "ire 
of God," as Bishop Gregory had hoped. Paulinus, the majestic 
monk, was ordained a bishop, and sent with the northern queen. 
So we have the Kentish history over again, with a change of 
names and places. Ethelberga has her chapel and chaplain ; 
Edwin has his Wodin and Thor. Like Clovis he permits his 
first child to be baptized — the little Eanfleda, who will have her 
part in giving prelacy the triumph over presbytery. The bishop 
pleads ; the king sits often for hours in silence. He is almost 
persuaded "to bow down before the life-giving cross." He will 
consult the Witan. It meets at Godmundingham, not far from 
York (627), and the wise men discuss the new faith. The 
chief priest, Coifi, frankly admits that his religion is worthless. 
"If there is a better one let us have it." 

"O king," said one of the thanes in his untaught wisdom, 
' ' so seems the life of man on earth, compared with the future, 
like a poor sparrow's flight through the hall when you are sit- 
ting at supper in Winter-tide, with the warm fire blazing on the 
hearth, and the icy rain-storm falling outside. The sparrow 
darts in at one door, lingers a moment, and flies out at the other, 
and is gone in the darkness. So is our brief life in this world ; 
what was before it, and what will come after it, we know not 
If this strange teacher can tell us, let him be heard." 

Paulinus set forth his doctrine. The king avowed his faith. 
The priest, mounting the king's horse, galloped to the temple, 
hurled a spear against it, bade others to set it on fire, and the 
external paganism of that spot went out in flames. The king, 
the court, and the Witan were baptized, and the national con- 
version began. Paulinus had his central church at York, and 
for six years his missionary labors must have been prodigious, f 
He may have insisted strongly on the temporal advantages of 
Christianity, but it was some gain to civilization to have a man 
in that heathendom "whose whole mind was set on bringing 
the Northumbrians to an avowal of the Christian faith." He 
went all over the realm preaching, baptizing, catechising, and 
' ' instructing the people who flocked to him from all the villages 

*' From 617 to 685 the supremacy of Northumberland is the spinal column 
of English history, both civil and ecclesiastical. 

tBede says that when with the king and queen at Yvering, he was thirty- 
six days, from morn till night, teaching and baptizing the crowds in the 
river Glen. 



REVERSES— OSWALD. 203 

and places in the word of Christ's salvation." Edwin's in- 
fluence reached far down to the South-folk (Suffolk), where 
King Sigebert restored the church, lately overthrown, sup- 
ported missionaries from Gaul and Ireland, founded a school, 
and finally set the bad example of retiring from royal duties 
into a cell which he had made for himself. 

And now came reverses. The wrath of Cadwalla, the 
Christian king of North Wales, flamed against Northumbria. 
He did not forget the slaughter of Brocmail's thousand monks. 
He allied himself with Penda, the Mercian king, who came near 
to reducing all the English to his desperately pagan rule. 
From Canterbury to Edinburgh the English Church almost 
went down in the long wars. Edwin fell (633), and Paulinus 
fled to Rochester, where he settled as bishop. The Roman 
form of the Church was suppressed in Northumbria, and we 
shall now see how the Culdee form was introduced. Oswald, 
a nephew of Edwin, had been in exile at Iona, where the faith 
was kept alive in his soul, while his brother renounced it, 
played king, and fell in battle. He came back to make a he- 
roic stand for his country. He and a small army, "fortified 
by faith in Christ," knelt by the cross in prayer, then charged 
upon the stronger forces of Cadwalla, and won the decisive bat- 
tle of Heaven's field. He took the fallen crown (635), brought 
order into the realm, and "was to Christians all that Edwin had 
been, and more ;" and was to the Saxon kingdoms a Bretwalda. 
The way was now clear for resuming missionary work. 

IV. The Culdee missions in England. Oswald had been 
kindly housed at Iona. Its presbyters were the men he wanted. 
He sent thither for a bishop. Corman came, hopelessly failed, 
and went back reporting that the Saxons were too rude and 
stubborn for him. "Was it their stubbornness or your sever- 
ity?" inquired the gentle brother Aidan. "Did you not' forget 
the apostolic rule about milk for babes?" All eyes turned upon 
Aidan; he was the right man for the mission. It seems that 
he went as a presbyter. He did not ask the sanction of Rome 
or Canterbury. An Anglican affirms that Aidan, ' ' much more 
truly than either Gregory or Augustine, may be called the father 
of English Christianity."* He did not begin, in the Roman 

* J. A. Baxter, Church History of England, I, p. 86. If the continuity of 
the early British or Celtic Church was preserved in the English Church, it was 



204 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

way, at the capital. He had the Celtic idea of a lonely spot for 
headquarters. He began at Lindisfarne, near the mouth of the 
Tweed; made it the Holy Island; had there his cell and training 
school, and there rose a famous Culdee monastery. Patient 
Scots taught Saxon lads to preach to their countrymen. Out of 
this convent poured a host of missionaries into England and 
Germany. Boisil founded Melrose to cast light into the dale of 
the Tweed, where one may still trace the paths of Cuthbert, the 
apostle of the Lowlands. A native of the Lammermoor, Cuth- 
bert's speech was that of the people, whom he drew from the 
villages and far off hills to hear the peasant preacher. He was 
but one of a score who did the like things. Some of their 
names are bright on the pages of Bede, who remembered how 
the true faith reached his fathers, and who took delight in tell- 
ing how Aidan lived, prayed, often sat alone on his islet, 
thought upon texts of Scripture, recited psalms, traveled widely 
on foot until king Oswald gave him a fine horse, talked with 
any one he met to win him, if a heathen, or to comfort him if 
a believer; how the king one day sent his own dinner to the 
crowd of peasants in the streets, and Aidan laid hold of the 
royal arm, saying: "May this hand never perish!" and how this 
man "of the utmost gentleness, piety, and moderation" had 
the one fault of "not observing Easter at the proper time," 
but nevertheless his chief theme was "the redemption of man- 
kind through the passion, resurrection, and ascension of the man 
Christ Jesus." If the king interpreted the sermons of the untir- 
ing presbyter-bishop to the rustics of Yorkshire, we do not won- 
der that the North-country long cherished the name of "Saint 
Oswald," whose "white hand of charity" was a theme of song. 
Nearly two hundred and fifty years before such Christian 
royalty reappeared in Alfred, his Wessex forefathers had light 
flung upon their darkness. About 634 Birinus confronted their 
intense heathenism, and won a royal convert, Cynegils, who 
must break his league with the furious Penda, and who was 
asked to give his daughter in marriage to the Northumbrian 
king. Oswald came for his bride. But her father must avow 

through Aidan. But we shall see that his Culdee polity and his genuine succes- 
sors were thrust out. They did well their work, and then were excluded. The 
two systems were not welded, nor wedded, nor amalgamated, nor grafted 
together. 



PRESBYTERY OR PRELACY. 205 

his faith in baptism before he could have a Christian son-in-law. 
The result was a triple alliance, domestic, political, and relig- 
ious, and a new turn in the destinies of Wessex, whose coming 
overlordship was to be so important in English history. Oswald 
fell in a battle (642) against the heathen Penda, where "Mesa- 
feld was whitened with the bones of the saints," and the 
ferocious Mercian gloried in the victories of Thor. Far up at 
Lindisfarne Aidan looks across on Bamborough, sees the fire 
and smoke rising, and lifts his prayer: ''Behold, Lord, what 
mischief Penda does!" The wind shifts, the flames drive back 
the besieger, and he whirls away into Wessex, whose new pagan 
king must learn the meaning of the Greek rhyme: "Tribulation, 
education." He learned it, and Celtic teachers helped him to 
rear schools. Oswy (642-70),. the reigning brother of Oswald, 
fought out the last great battle between the Christian creed 
and the Saxon mythology. Penda fell, and with him fell organ- 
ized and military paganism in England. Already his son Penda 
had sought the hand of Oswy's daughter. "You must first ac- 
cept the faith of Christ and baptism; you and your people," said 
Oswy. The young Mercian listened to the Gospel and said: "I 
will be a Christian whether I win the maiden or not." He was 
baptized and married, and went home with four missionaries of 
the Culdee type. Mercia became a nominally Christian realm. 
Thus the Culdee Church had extended far down into Eng- 
land. Some of its presbyters there ranked as bishops, but its 
bishops were hardly prelates of the Roman order. Their pres- 
byterial polity still differed from the prelatic. What if the 
English Church should conform to Iona rather than to Rome? 
The event was not impossible. The Celtic preachers and monks 
probably outnumbered the Roman. They quoted Columba 
rather than Gregory. Oswy favored them, but his wife, Ean- 
fleda, Edwin's child, had been reared at the Kentish court, and 
she had the Roman ideas. While he kept Easter she was still 
in Lent. His feast did not harmonize with her fast. So all 
the differences between the Celtic and Roman Christians Avere 
again at the front. The debates ran through the land. Bishops 
were not agreed. The real question was then of immense 
weight, for it meant that Iona,* or Rome, should have the 



•:•:- "The rea j metropolitan of the Church as it existed in the north of Eng- 
land was (then) the abbot of Iona." (Green's Short History.) 



206 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

control; Presbytery or Prelacy should thenceforth be the polity 
in England for centuries. How was it settled? 

V. The Conference at Whitby. It was held in the new 
convent of the famous Hilda, 664, on the summons of King 
Oswy, who pressed the Easter question. Which is the truer, 
the Celtic or the Roman tradition? The two champions in the 
debate were eminent men in their time. Colman, abbot of 
Lindisfarne, was a bishop of Culdee monasteries and mission- 
aries in the North. It was no small advantage to his cause to 
have the support of the king and the princely abbess, Hilda. 
The other leader was Wilfrid, who had studied under Aidan, 
committed the psalter to memory, and won the love of his 
fellows, but refused the Celtic tonsure. He went to Rome, 
visited other cities, and returned with the Roman principles, 
a love of Roman domination, the coronal tonsure, a store of 
relics, and an enlarged ambition. Culdee monks left him the 
monastery of Ripon, where as an abbot, not yet a presbyter, 
he began to organize the Romanizing party. He had on his 
side the queen, Eanfleda. He looked on the Culdee system as 
one that ''grew up in a corner, apart from all genial and ex- 
pansive influences." The arguments at Whitby came to this 
result : the king asked Colman, ' ' Do you admit that Christ gave 
the keys to St. Peter?" "Certainly." "Did he ever give the 
like power to Columba?" "Never." "You both admit, then, 
that to Peter were given the keys of the kingdom of heaven?" 
They both assented. Then Oswy, with a quiet smile, said: 
"Peter is the door-keeper whom I do not choose to gainsay, 
lest haply, when I come to the doors of heaven, there be none 
to unbar them." Thus a misinterpretation of Holy Scripture 
decided the question, and Roman prelacy had its long sway 
over the English Church. Colman, "being worsted," and other 
Scots, who did not conform to the triumphant system, wandered 
North, and beyond the Clyde they kept alive their principles. 
Bright says of the Culdee Church : "It brought religion straight 
home to men's hearts by the sheer power of love and self-sacri- 
fice; it held up before them, in the unconscious goodness and 
nobleness of its representatives, the moral evidence of Christi- 
anity." Bede saw in his day that England had greatly lost by 
the departure of men whose anxiety was ' ' not how to serve the 
world, but how to serve God." They had their faults, but 



WILFRID. 207 

their victors had a needed lesson in their virtues. Yet Bede 
took some pleasure in recording that, "in the year 716, . . . 
Egbert, the man of God, brought the monks of Hi (Iona) to 
observe the Catholic Easter and ecclesiastical tonsure." This 
Egbert was one of the monks who had gone North from an 
Anglo-Saxon realm. He represents an earnest effort to Anglicize 
the Scottish Church by volunteers and refugees. The kings of 
the Scots and Picts began to esteem Rome as grander than Iona. 
King Angus gave welcome to the exiled bishop Acca, who 
brought from Hexham a store of relics and the principles of 
Wilfrid. This king seems to have placed the bishop and the 
relics at St. Andrews (736), the future metropolitan Church of 
Scotland. But far back in those days "the tenacity of the 
Scots" was manifest. Many of them held fast to their old 
polity. In 816 they were forbidden to minister in England, 
not merely as Scots, but as Culdees. 

The triumphant Wilfrid is a man to be studied. He was the 
Caesar of prelatic Rome, battling for her conquests. He had 
learning, energy, versatility, heroism, ambition, egotism, and 
imperiousness. His chief struggles through forty -five years 
(664-709) mark the degree of papal power then admitted in 
England. The Witan of Northumbria elected him Bishop of 
York. Contests rose, and he spent much of his time running 
to and from Rome, with brilliant episodes of missionary toil. 
In his romantic life of successes, defeats, exile and return, we 
find some redeeming qualities. But when he was removed from 
his chair, and the hard-working Chad placed in it, he set Eng- 
land the bad example of appealing to Rome. On his way he 
was stranded in Frisia, and was the first of a missionary host to 
the barbarians there. The pope sustained his appeal, but the 
English would not submit; and this was their first open resist- 
ance to the papal authority. Wilfrid was flung into a prison, 
whose walls rang with his psalms. When released, he went 
into Sussex, where the fierce heathen had once tried to kill 
him. They were now in sore famine and despair, leaping into 
the sea to end their hunger. His rare versatility did not fail 
him. He taught them new modes of fishing, won their hearts. 
baptized their chiefs along with scores of peasants, built a 
monastery, and for five years this apostle of the South Saxons 
was their bishop. Fuller says, "As the nightingales sing 



208 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

sweetest when farthest from their nests, so Wilfrid did the best 
service for Christianity when farthest from home." At last he 
was at home, in his episcopal chair (686) ; but he had too many- 
troubles to keep himself in it, for Rome was not yet so potent 
over the English Church as in his own mind. 

VI. The unity and nationalization of the English Church. 
These were chiefly due to a foreigner. Theodore of Tarsus, 
"a philosopher and divine of Eastern training," a monk in 
Rome, learned in Greek, Latin, and natural science, sixty-six 
years of age, was chosen Archbishop of Canterbury, through 
the diligence of Oswy, the Bretwalda, who acted for ' ' the 
Church of the English race." He was consecrated at Rome, 
and for twenty-five years (668-693) he labored to give that 
Church more unity, better organization, broader culture, and 
a more national character. He was more independent of the 
Roman bishop than Wilfrid first dreamed, and well disposed to 
carry out the policy of Oswy. The Latin service was unwisely 
fixed for ages upon that Church. Dioceses and parishes were 
more wisely arranged. The penitential system was introduced. 
The clergy were supported by the state. Synods were held. 
The Council of Hertford (673) was the first of all national 
gatherings, and through the bishops of the several kingdoms 
it expressed the ecclesiastical unity ; and this was the only 
visible unity for one hundred and fifty years.* There were 
some deep plunges into theology, and earnest gropings after 
the facts of physical science. English students had been sent 
to the monasteries of the Irish and Scots. Theodore pro- 
vided for them schools of a high order at home. The school 
at Canterbury under Hadrian, a foreign scholar, taught more 
than "ecclesiastical arithmetic" (or the calculation of the 
Church seasons) ; for Theodore was one of the lecturers on 
astronomy, medicine, music, and the classics. It was a model 
for other schools, in one of which Bede was now acquiring his 
knowledge, so vast for his time. He tells of men who knew 
Greek and Latin as well as their mother-tongue. 

Culture had its effects. Kings waged war with less burning 
and butchery; and even in those "killing times" many a 
thatched wooden chapel gave way to a stone church with 
glazed windows, decorated walls, and a leaden roof. Wilfrid 

*Note VI. 



LITERATURE— CAEDMON. 209 

brought from the Continent fine ideas and plans of Church 
architecture, and he did what he could to make them real. If 
he did not have Benedict Biscop as a sympathizer in all his 
troubles, he had him as the noblest co-worker in religious art. 
Benedict was six times at Rome ; he saw the best buildings of 
Europe ; and he brought over Frankish masons and decorators 
when he reared his monasteries of Wearmouth (674) and Jar- 
row, near the present Newcastle. Their splendor, comfort, 
music, statues, and paintings mark the advance in art which 
had begun in the North, but was soon manifest in all England. 
Into them he brought the Benedictine rule. He and Arch- 
bishop Theodore had the finest libraries yet in the Saxon 
realms. The busy, studious, benevolent, saintly Biscop, once 
a thane of Oswy, now an infirm monk at sixty-two, took de- 
light in his last weary days and sleepless nights in hearing the 
Bible read and Psalms chanted by his spiritual sons. In 690 
Bede may have been among those who wept on their way* to 
his grave. 

VII. Christianity gave a literatyre to the English. They were 
the first of the Germanic peoples to give it birth. Its infant 
life was nourished, not by mythology, but by Holy Scripture. 
The ballads of the early Saxons, long sung in cottage and in 
castle, did not pass into literature before a more sacred song 
was written. It came in an outburst of genius at Whitby. 
We might almost expect it there, amid the genial and spiritual 
life promoted by the Abbess Hilda, the Northern Deborah, 
grand-niece of Edwin, called from a Frankish convent by Aidan 
about 660, given charge of both monks and nuns at Whitby, 
and so training the monks that bishops looked to her house for 
earnest men who would find the lost sheep of Christ and feed 
the flock with holy truths. The very servants caught the 
spirit. The story is that Caedmon, the cowherd at the abbey, 
one evening foddered the little black cattle, followed some min- 
strels into the hall, left the cheerful company, flung himself on 
the straw in the barn, grieved that he could not touch the harp 
and play the gleeman in the rooms of the abbess, and in his 
hard-won sleep thought some one urged him to sing. ' ' I can 
not; and that is why I left the party," said he. "But you 
must sing to me." "What?" "Sing of creation." And so 
the verses came. The abbess soon found out his gift, and per- 

H 



210 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

suaded him to become a monk. Into rude alliterative verse 
and Saxon words he threw many of the grandest chapters of 
the Bible. By this new minstrelsy heavenly truths reached 
many a serf and cottager, for whom the Divine Book was not 
yet translated and sermons had no charm. To them it was the 
God-spell, the good story of God.* 

Farther south, in the school at Canterbury, was Aldhelm, a 
Wessex prince, acquiring nearly all the lore of his time — 
Greek, Latin, and Hebrew — and then returning to his studies 
under the Irish Mailduf, about whose cell grew Maildufsburgh, 
or Malmesbury. There, in 675, Aldhelm became abbot. It 
was not enough for him to be the first classical scholar in his 
land, for it was still nobler to evangelize the rude West-Saxons 
in the woods around him. When they came to hear mass they 
would not wait for the sermon, being more intent on their 
marketings, even on holy days. So he went to the bridge and 
stopped them with his Christian minstrelsy — for all Saxons 
were fascinated by music — and when he had gathered a crowd 
he glided from the song into a sermon which they were willing 
to hear. " His Pauline versatility" made him the needed man 
for his country. He did most to raise it to the level of 
Northumbria in the number of its monastic schools and its 
churches. He helped King Ina in framing a code of laws; 
contributed to a Saxon version of the Psalms ; wrote a few 
Latin treatises ; and brought over some of the Welsh, not quite 
fairly, into the English Church. When the Witan chose him 
Bishop of Sherborne he said, "I am too old; I need rest." 
The reply was, by acclamation, "The older, the wiser and 
fitter." He consented; and at the end of four years (705-709) 
he rested from his labors and his works followed him. 



*A century was full time enough to bring from the Roman teachers an 
Anglo-Saxon version of the Bible. But not a verse translated by them is known. 
Archbishop Theodore soon required parents to see that "their children were 
taught to say the [Apostles'] Creed and the Lord's Prayer in their native 
tongue." Bede urged Egbert, Bishop of York (730), a fine scholar with a fa- 
mous library, to put this Creed and this Prayer into English, for the use of both 
clergy and laity, saying that he had already translated them. When Bede trans- 
lated a part of the Bible he was meeting a demand long felt by his native 
countrymen. Perhaps versions had already been attempted by Elfrid of Lin- 
disfarne (710), and Guthlac, the first Saxon monk at Croyland. But the demand 
scarcely existed when the word of a priest took the place of the Word of God. 
Hence the literature based on Scripture was soon Latinized. 



BEDE. 211 

More worthily is Bede (673-735) called the first great En- 
glish scholar and the Venerable. Born on the lands granted 
to Benedict Biscop for his monasteries, he was placed, in his 
eighth year, under the care of their founder, and reared a Ben- 
edictine. His "regular discipline" was obedience to the rule 
of the Nursian. He took his turn in the field, at the mill, in 
the bakery, and on the sheep-walk. Passing early from Wear- 
mouth into Jarrow, he says: "All my (remaining) life I spent 
in that monastery, giving my whole attention to the study of 
the Holy Scriptures ; and in the intervals between the hours 
of regular discipline and the duties of singing in the church I 
always took pleasure in learning or teaching or writing some- 
thing." He was always a patriot, loving the national songs, 
and hating whatever worked ill to his country ; a man of warm 
heart to his neighbors, to whom he sometimes preached (for he 
became a priest), and especially to his pupils, of whom there 
were at one time six hundred. He was once, in old age, 
as far away from Jarrow as York ; the story of his visit to 
Rome is fabulous. Biscop's fine library was for him a world 
in which to travel. Burke styled him the father of English 
learning. He certainly was the father of English history. 
Often too credulous, always eager to get the facts, especially 
those about the Church, he led the story from the time of the 
early Britons down to the year 731, "with God's help." This 
volume gave him fame ; it tells us all we really know of the 
early English Church. But he valued his commentaries* upon 
large portions of the Bible above all else that he had written, 
and that was almost a library, or cyclopaedia of literature, of 
physical and theological science, and of biography. Had he 
written all his many works in Anglo-Saxon, and urged men to 
learn and teach it, he would have done far more for popular 
culture, and anticipated Alfred. He and some of his brethren 
did recommend preaching in their own language; but the effort 
was not vigorous, and Latin was soon idolized. 

Bede's last work was a translation of the Gospel of John — 
meet work for the John of his time — and as he was dying slowly, 
day by day, telling his young scribe what to write, until there 
was only one verse more, he said, "Write it quickly." When 

-There is too much eisegesis in his attempts at exegesis. He quoted largely 
from Jerome and Augustine. 



212 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

told, ''It is finished now," he replied, "Yes, all is finished 
now," turned his face toward the spot where he was wont to 
pray, and began to chant, "Glory to God." With the close 
of the song his spirit passed into rest. 

One more eminent scholar rose in the next generation — 
Alcuin, already seen at the court of Charlemagne — and then 
came the Northmen, with desolation to churches and schools. 

III. The Frankish Missions. 

The earnest example of Columban had some rousing effect 
upon the Gallic clergy, whom Pope Gregory severely rebuked 
for want of missionary enterprise. In 613, two years before 
Columban's death, they held a synod to devise measures for 
evangelizing the heathen. Nowhere else have we seen a national 
or provincial Church acting thus in a body: missionaries have 
usually gone of their own accord.* They sent Eustasius, Abbot 
of Luxeuil, with a monk, into Bavaria. Bishop Emmeran re- 
signed his see in Aquitaine, went into the same wide country, 
and made roads for Bishop Rupert, of Worms, who left an im- 
perishable name on the towns from Ratisbon over into the val- 
ley of the Tyrol. A few Christians lingered there in poverty and 
oppression. At first the wild mountaineers would not listen to 
Rupert : they said that the God of the Christians was too poor 
to relieve the wants of his own worshipers, and too jealous to 
allow any other god. But when he got them to work in the 
mines and salt wells, or in fields which brought harvests, they 
grew happier and changed their opinion. Then they cared little 
when he assailed the strongholds of idolatry. A duke gave 
him the old ruined town of Juvavium, strewn with the remains 
of Roman baths and temples, every broken arch telling the 
wrath of the Heruli. There a church rose, and that swelled 
into the cathedral of Salzburg. That city became a center of 
evangelization. Henceforth to the time of the persecuted 
Salzburgers there was in those valleys a spirit of independence 
toward Rome. 

Bishop Virgil of Salzburg — the Irish Feargil (745) — was 
the man who seems to have held that there was, below our 
earth, another world, with sun, moon, and men of its own. 



* Augustine and Aidan excepted. The abbots of monasteries doubtless 
sent out men. 



VIRGIL OF SALSBURG— ELIGIUS OF NOYON. 213 

Pope Zachanas condemned such a notion, but Virgil cleared 
himself of heresy. He was not a Galileo in his theory, nor in 
his trials. He devoted his energies to rescuing the people of 
this world from heathenism, and great success is reported.* 
Not far away from him was Clement, a brother Irishman, who 
was condemned b> a synod under the great missionary Boni- 
face for his opposition to high prelacy and the papacy ; for not 
sufficiently revering the Church Fathers, not even Jerome and 
Augustine ; for denying vows of celibacy, and for some doc- 
trines which were undoubtedly erroneous. 

Another representative of the Frankish missionaries was 
Eligius, or St. Eloy, the wonderful goldsmith, and treasurer of 
his king, the firm Christian at a profligate court, the redeemer 
of captives by the ship-load, and the helper of young men who 
were training to preach to the heathen. To any one seeking 
his house the reply was, ' ' Wherever you see the largest crowd 
of paupers, there you may be sure to find Eligius." He was 
made Bishop of Noyon, then a chief city (641-59). In the 
eastern part of his diocese and on into Frisia were heathen 
tribes of the most barbarous kind. He spent his remaining 
years in civilizing them by mearfe of Christianity ; traversing the 
forests, preaching, building churches and convents, and endeav- 
oring not to baptize paganism along with the*]^agan. He has 
been quoted as preaching a mere J formalism, and service of 
rites, and placing human inventions on a level with Gospel 
precepts. Too much of this may be found in all men of that 
age, yet he quotes a good amount of home-going Scripture, 
and among other sound paragraphs he has this: he represents 
Christ as saying to the unbeliever, ' ' Behold and see ! see the 
mark of the nails that fixed me to the cross ! I took upon me 
thy punishment that I might crown thee with glory. I died 
that thou mightest live forever. But thou didst despise me and 
obey a deceiver. My justice, therefore, can not pronounce any 
other sentence than such as thy works deserve. Thou didst 
choose thine own way, therefore take thine own wages. Thou 

*He refused to rebaptize some men who had been baptized by a priest, 
with the words, "Baptizo te in nomine Patria, Filia, et Spiritu Sancta." Pope 
Zacharias held that the baptism was perfectly valid, as the mistake arose not 
from heretical pravity, but from mere ignorance of grammar. Boniface, how- 
ever, thought that such ignorance invalidated the baptism, and not that " faith 
ought to be blind." 



214 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

didst love death; depart, then, go to perdition. Thou didst 
obey the evil one; go, then, with him into eternal punishment." 
When dying among his weeping monks, he prayed, " Remem- 
ber me, O Thou who alone art free from sin, Christ the Savior 
of the world. I know that I deserve not to behold thy face, 
but thou knowest how my hope was always in thy mercy, and 
my trust in thy faithfulness." Just nine hundred years later a 
child of Noyon, John Calvin, was born, but during that inter- 
val a sounder Gospel was rarely preached than this of St. Eloy. 
Often did the nominally converted people relapse into hea- 
thenism. The famous Radbod in furious zeal undid much of 
Wilfrid's work in Frisia. At last he seemed to yield to the 
teaching of Wulfram, a Frank who had left his bishopric of 
Sens, to persuade these savages not to hang human sacrifices 
upon gibbets, but trust in Him who was crucified for their 
sins. Radbod permitted one of his children to be baptized, and 
finally was about to submit to the ordinance. His feet were in 
the font, when he asked to be told in which of the future 
worlds his fathers were. Wulfram said they were undoubtedly 
in perdition. "I would rather be there with my ancestors," 
replied the king, "than in heaven with a handful of beggars," 
and stepping out of the font he remained a heathen. The 
Frankish ruler, Pipin of Heristal, gave welcome to Willibrord 
of Ripon, and his twelve monks, who landed in Frisia (692), 
and sent him to Rome to be fully commissioned by Pope Ser- 
gius. This pope afterwards made him Archbishop of Utrecht. 
He and the native convert, Liudger, invaded the holy Isle of 
Fosite, so named from a god to whom human beings were 
sacrificed. The temple was destroyed. The sailors began to 
hear bells ringing from the church spires of Heligoland, and 
warning them of the breakers. It became a spiritual Pharos. 
Christianity was planted in the Netherlands, so often since the 
home of piety, heroism, and liberty. 

IV. The English Missions. 

The eminent representative of this movement, in which he 
had many fore-runners and assistants, was Winfrid, .or Boniface, 
"the father of civilization in Germany." Born of noble par- 
ents (680), at Crediton, in Wessex, reared in the schools of 
Aldhelm ; under monastic vows at Nutsall ; ordained a priest 



THE ENGLISH MISSIONS— BONIFACE. 21 5 

with an open road to high position ; a favorite of King Ina, 
and well known as a scholar, he was anxious to see his kindred 
Saxons in the old father-land converted to Christ. With three 
monks he crossed into Frisia. Radbod was then fighting 
Charles Martel, devastating the new Frisian churches, and re- 
storing paganism. These two representatives of Christ and 
Wodin met. There was no compromise possible, and Boniface 
returned to his convent at Nutsall, refused its abbacy, and bade 
farewell to England, resolved to work or die on foreign soil. 
Perhaps the pope could help him. He was soon at Rome. 
Armed with the commission of Gregory II, and an ample sup- 
ply of relics, he passed through the melting snows of the Alps, 
and fell into the track of Rupert, who had gone to Salzburg, 
and into paths trodden by the imitators of Columban. Wish- 
ing to build on no other man's foundation, he pressed on into 
Saxony. We give a summary of his policy and the results : 

1. He strengthened the growing empire of the Franks, 
and promoted reforms of the Gallic clergy. By aiding Pipin 
(father of Charlemagne) in eliminating the Celtic preachers, he 
more fully Germanized the Frankish Church. ' ' He was states- 
man and scholar, as well as missionary ; an able administrator 
as well as an earnest preacher ; and his aim was to civilize as 
well as to Christianize the heathen of his father-land." 

2. He acted as a high prelate. He greatly helped to bring 
Germany under the jurisdiction of the pope. 551 He was severe 
upon that "early Protestantism" which came from the Celtic 
Church. The Irish and Scots, whose wives were the best of 
helpers in mission work, were surely not so black in morals as 
he painted them. He treated the most earnest of them as 
rivals, had ceaseless controversies with them, and in his zeal to 
correct their freedom he revived the synodical system, which 
was one good result, if the synods were not too much under 
his management. He silenced nearly all opponents by the 
force of a will that sometimes crossed a papal decree. If he 



*"The unity of the kingdom of Gpd upon earth, the fraternization of all 
mankind gathered beneath the care of one shepherd, the pope and vicar of 
Christ, was his visionary scheme, and in his enthusiasm he entirely overlooked 
the diversity of nations and languages, and sought to remedy that difficulty by 
making the Latin tongue the only one authorized by the Church." (Menzel.) 
On the use of Latin see Note IV. 



2l6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

did not fully control the European Church while he lived, he 
certainly excelled all other men in his power. And yet he 
studied, taught, and circulated the Word of God. He is not 
unworthily styled "the apostle of the Germans." 

3. The oak near Geismar fell. Boniface was advised to 
argue mildly, and not expose the genealogy of the heathen 
gods. But he grew impatient, and resorted to arguments 
which the pagans could understand. They had an oak sacred 
to Thor, Donar, the thunder-god, and all Hessians seemed to 
hang their faith upon it. There was their rallying point. He 
and his monks took axes, cut deeply into it, and a sudden gust 
of wind brought it to the ground with a deafening crash. The 
heathen crowd, it is said, at once shouted, "The Lord, he is 
the God!" and helped Boniface hew the old tree and build a 
chapel to St. Peter, who probably took the place of Thor in 
the more ignorant minds. 

4. The progress of the work. The Frankish kings had 
opened the way for civilization in a land where nothing that 
could be called a city stood as a basis of operations. Even cities 
must be created. England sent bands of monks for the work. 
Numbers in Hessia and Thuringia were baptized, heathen tem- 
ples disappeared, wooden chapels were built where grand cathe- 
drals afterwards rose, forests slowly became fields, daylight was 
let into marshy thickets where wolves had lurked, and a holier 
light broke into savage hearts and homes. With all that was 
superficial, there was much which was permanent. A begin- 
ning was made for pastors to settle in towns. About the 
bishop's house laborers of all grades found residence. Farmers 
did their best with rude plows, while warriors handled swords 
more than pruning-hooks. The land-owner became rather 
more of a gentle-man, and his wife the worthier Christian. 
All the influences of monasteries were felt for good and evil. 
The Church was the center of the best society. The name of 
a kindly priest grew sacred, and it was a great day when his 
classes of children, robed in white, were confirmed by the 
bishop. "Boniface may be fairly regarded, not merely as a 
teacher of Christianity in Germany, but as the missionary of a 
higher civilization, and the founder of cities." 

5. The episcopal system was established in Germany. In 
745 Boniface became Archbishop of Mayence. Already he 



MARTYRDOM OF BONIFACE. 21 J 

had founded dioceses at various points from Salzburg to Co- 
logne, and thence to the farthest borders of Thuringia. Thus 
he was completing his centralizing project, by which Rome be- 
came powerful in Germany. Soon grew up those bishop's- 
towns of Erfurt, Worms, Spires, which we associate with 
Luther, the next mighty man in the history of the German 
Church. It was Luther who restored that noble spirit which 
Boniface had crushed — the spirit of independence towards Rome. 

6. The mission and martyrdom of Boniface in Frisia. 
The Saxons of that country still fought the Franks, and 
thought the Church was an engine for reducing them to order 
and law. They were the thorns in the side of Boniface all 
through his thirty years of ceaseless labors. They burnt 
chapels and convents, and slaughtered the poor folk by hun- 
dreds. He gave his minute instructions to bishops and pas- 
tors ; left most of his books to the library of Fulda ; put into 
his luggage the relics which he always bore, a tract of Am- 
brose on "The Advantages of Death," and a shroud for 
himself; and the old man of seventy-four years sailed down the 
Rhine to the Zuyder Zee to preach to those Frisians who had 
driven him off in his younger days. All went well for a time 
with him and his companions. Some of the tribes gave him 
welcome. He had baptized a multitude, and on the 5 th of 
June, 755, the converts were to meet for confirmation. But 
that morning he was waked in his tent by the tramp of men 
and the clang of arms. He stepped forth and said to his 
brethren, "Lift not a staff against them. Let us not return 
evil for evil." The heathen murdered the little band, rifled 
the tent, and hid the book of Gospels in a marsh. It and 
the remains of its preacher were afterwards placed at Fulda as 
relics of peculiar worth. 

7. The monasteries of Fulda and Utrecht. Fulda, the first 
in Saxony, took its name from one of the head-streams of the 
Weser, and its origin from Boniface. It grew out of the cell 
in the forest to which he and Sturmi often resorted for rest, 
study, and prayer. Its rule was severer than that of Benedict. 
It was a center of evangelization, became rich in lands, the 
home of scholars, and the model for similar establishments. 
Utrecht rose to eminence through Gregory. The abbess of a 
nunnery, on the Moselle, employed her nephew Gregory to 



2l8 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

read the Scriptures to the company at meal-time. On a visit 
there, Boniface said to the lad of fifteen, "You read the Latin 
well, but do you understand it?" This led to a German version 
of the passage and comments upon it, which so charmed 
Gregory that he resolved to follow the good monk. ' ' But he 
is a stranger, and may not be what you think," said his aunt, 
who at last yielded, and gave him an outfit. He was, there- 
after, the spiritual armor-bearer of Boniface, until he became a 
professor of theology, training young men for the ministry. As 
abbot he made the monastery of Utrecht a missionary college, 
and left behind him the reputation of a wise educator. 

8. The military methods of Charlemagne. The peaceful 
measures of Boniface and his followers had not brought all the 
Saxons to even a nominal Christianity. They hated the Franks, 
'and when conquered, would not remain in subjection. They 
swept over the country under the bold Witikind, and forced 
their idolatry once more across the Rhine. In this third terri- 
ble war upon them Charlemagne, who regarded them as rebels 
as well as heathen, took with him both soldiers and preachers. 
It must be admitted that now the alternative was, ' ' Believe or 
die." But we should not forget that the terms had been of- 
fered, ' ' Be quiet and live. " One voice, at least, was loud in pro- 
test against these severe measures ; it was that of Alcuin, who 
cited the examples of our Lord and his apostles. "Why impose 
baptism upon a rude people ? Of what use is baptism without 
faith? The trouble is, the wretched people of Saxony have 
no faith in their hearts. Augustine says, faith is a matter of 
free will, and not of compulsion. You may force a man to 
the font, but not to faith." Yet Charlemagne persisted in his 
policy. In a former campaign he had marched to the Irmin- 
Saule (the image of the hero Armin ?) which was a head- 
quarters of paganism, and destroyed the immense idol. Sturmi 
and his four thousand monks had been ordered to cut down idol 
groves, demolish temples, and preach the faith. But now Fulda 
had been assailed, and revenge taken by the Saxons on the 
churches and clergy. Charlemagne was bent on making short 
work of heathenism. Death was made the penalty for secret 
idolatry, neglect of baptism and of fasts, the murder of priests, 
the burning of churches, and the practice of various pagan 
customs. The chiefs submitted. Even Witikind was at last 



THE GERMAN MISSIONS. 2IO, 

baptized, and among his descendants were famous emperors. 
His race soon lost the memory of the force which subdued 
them, and cherished the faith which saved them, and produced 
the Heliand, that glorious song in honor of the Savior, whose 
Gospel is its poetry and music. It was the first peal of those 
songs which tell how they regarded themselves as the liegemen 
of Jesus Christ, owing him fealty, and bound to serve him 
faithfully till death. 

There were two great results. By the subjection of the 
Saxons they were kept from overrunning the more civilized 
lands of Europe, and at home they were a bar against the 
Norse peoples, who could not make land-marches through Ger- 
many, and hence they became rovers of the seas. By the con- 
version of the Saxons they were prepared for Christian missions 
to the Scandinavians. 

V. The German Missions. 

One of the last plans of Charlemagne was to make Ham- 
burg the seat of an archbishop, and a base of missionary 
labors in Denmark. Long before he was crowned emperor he 
had put in his schools a little serf who was now primate Ebbo 
of Rheims. Other feet had been over the border, but his car- 
ried him up to the court of Harold Klak, in 822, and three 
years later he came down to Mayence with the king, Queen 
Judith, their family, and a train of Danes, and baptized them 
with great pomp in the vast cathedral. Ebbo did not easily 
find a monk heroic enough to return with the party and risk 
his life among the heathen Danes. But Anskar, who had been 
devoted by his parents to a monastic life, educated at old 
Corbey, under Paschasius Radbert,* and sent to build up the 
new Corbey on the Weser, was willing to leave his thriving 
school, and the neighbors to whom he preached, and begin 
that brave life so full of romance, zeal, and true glory. We 
follow "the Apostle of the North," not in all his personal 
travels and trials, but in his influence. He began his new work 
at the age of twenty-five, and was in it nearly forty years 
(826-865). 

1. His labors in Sweden. He soon found a rebellion in 

*This missionary movement was contemporary with the controversies on 
Predestination and Transubstantiation. See next chapter. 



220 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Denmark, after Harold destroyed certain heathen temples, and 
his fair beginnings were arrested. Some Swedes, taught by 
Christian captives, invited him to their country. He and Wit- 
mar set sail on the Baltic. Pirates robbed them of their books, 
robes, and presents for king Biorn at Sigtuna. Their sad plight 
touched the royal heart. He allowed them to preach. But the 
northern Balder was not to him a forerunner of Christ. The 
Christian captives formed the nucleus of a Church at Birka. A 
royal counselor, Herigar, built a chapel on his estate, and 
showed himself no half-hearted believer. To this man Christian 
Sweden owes a ceaseless debt of gratitude, for when his king 
was expelled and Anskar was in deepest troubles, when Birka 
was stormed by Norse pirates and its people were restoring 
the altars to the gods ; when the Church was forsaken and Christ 
ignored, Herigar rebuked the lapsing citizens, rekindled their 
faith and led them upon the commons, where they renewed 
their vows to the Lord God omnipotent and trusted in him for 
defense. Christianity took root in Sweden, and it grew some- 
what despite Norse ravages, lapses from the faith, and the 
migrations of people. 

2. Anskar was made archbishop of Hamburg by papal 
authority, in 832, and he superintended all the northern mis- 
sions. His monastery was filled with redeemed captives and 
refugees from Norse piracy. After it was sacked and burnt 
he stood in the ashes, with groups of poor boys and monks 
around him, and said: "The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken 
away; blessed be the name of the Lord." And when he must 
flee with his co-workers and see heathenism rampant where he 
had thought Christianity was almost supreme, he took comfort 
in the words of the dying Ebbo: "Be assured, brother, that 
what we attempt to plant for Christ will at last come to fruit- 
age." The clouds seem to break when Herigar gave shield 
and footing to other missionaries in Sweden. Christian mer- 
chants aided them. The Swedish nobles cast pagan lots, and 
Anskar said the Lord decided for the Christian faith. But even 
the miracles afterwards ascribed to Anskar did not firmly estab- 
lish the Church in Scandinavian lands. He did great things 
with §0 little self-glorying that he could say : ' ' If I were worthy 
in the sight of my Lord, I would ask him to grant me one 
miracle — that he would make me a good man." That it was 



NOTES TO CHAPTER X. 221 

granted him was the belief of Rimbert and other disciples who 
pushed the missions in Sweden. The conversion of Norway 
was largely due to the later Anglo-Danish influence over all 
Scandinavia. (Notes I, II, III.) 



NOTES. 

1. Greek Missions in Etirope. I. From Constantinople Cyril and Me- 
thodius went into Bulgaria, Moravia, and Bohemia, about 863. Their 
mission produced vast results. Cyril formed an alphabet and translated 
the Bible into the Slavonic language. He thus gave it to the common peo- 
ple, a work which we find no other missionary after Ulfilas doing in the 
Middle Ages. The Moravians and Bohemians long insisted upon their 
mother-tongue as the language of their Church. As Methodius used a 
Slavonic liturgy he was branded as a traitor to the faith by the German 
missionaries from Salzburg. He justified himself before the pope (880), but 
this sad conflict wore out his spirit. The Church which he planted left the 
Greek communion and went over to the Roman. In 983 Adelbert, a learned 
German, was bishop of Prague, and very zealous against the surviving 
paganism. There was a long strife to maintain the native liturgy, which 
was never fully suppressed, and a love for it is seen far down to the days 
of John Huss. If other nations had clung as tenaciously to their own lan- 
guages in the Church services, they would have become less Latinized and 
hence less Romanized. This version of the Bible passed into Russia and 
to other Slavonic peoples. 

2. In 955 the princess Olga, of Russia, visited Constantinople, was bap- 
tized, and returned home quite zealous for the faith, though not successful 
until her grandson, Vladimir, took the throne at Kieff (986). He destroyed 
idols, built churches, and brought in Greek priests. 

II. German Missions among Slavonians. 1. In 966 a Bohemian prin- 
cess married the Polish Duke Mjesko, and carried with her Cyril's version 
of the Bible and a love for it. Their violent iconoclasm was resisted. Cas- 
imir I was an inmate of a monastery, perhaps Cluny, before he took the 
throne (1034); he established the Church in Poland on the Roman model. 
2. Among the Wends efforts were made in 936. When Gottschalk, educated 
in Germany, founded the Wendish empire in 1047, he began the work in 
which he was a martyr, but paganism triumphed. 3. The Hungarians 
came from Greek under German influence, and the Church was established 
about 997 in the Latin form. 4. In Pomerania there were no very success- 
ful efforts until 1124, when Otho entered it as a zealous missionary and one 
of great fame. 5. In Prussia (a small province then on the Baltic) mission- 
aries labored from 996 to 12 10 without permanently good results. Soon 
after this the Teutonic Knights (originating in the crusades) were efficient 
in their efforts with the Gospel backed by the sword and the commission of 
the popes. 



222 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

III. Missions to the Saracens. Raymond Lull, of Majorca, reckless in 
youth, converted somewhat as Augustine was, studied for years almost every 
science (and attempted a universal system of knowledge) to qualify him for 
preaching to the Mohammedans (1275-1315). After crossing the Mediter- 
ranean several times, but being resisted at Tunis and elsewhere, imprisoned 
and scourged, he tried to work up a new Crusade ; lectured with applause 
in European universities; died a martyr, and left to history one of the 
splendid failures of genius. 

IV. The universal use of Latin in the Western Church came through 
the desire to preserve antiquity, and promote unity and conformity in wor- 
ship. It was the language of the old empire, whose spell hung long over 
the nations, and of diplomacy between the new governments. It was in the 
schools, text-books, and monasteries. It was the language of the civilization 
which the new nations imitated, of the clergy, of "the mother Church" of the 
West (as Rome was then regarded), and of the Vulgate, which had won the 
pre-eminence. Its continued use was not unnatural. The desire for a uni- 
form service has often appeared from that time down to our own. Yet the 
Liturgies were slowly brought to the Roman model. The fixed religious use 
of the Latin language among nations of other speech, tended to limit edu- 
cation to the monks and clergy ; to reduce their knowledge to a minimum ; 
to make the Church services cold and mechanical; to keep the people 
ignorant and superstitious, so that they looked upon the sacred offices as 
powerful charms, and placed their salvation in them ; to bring suspicion and 
ecclesiastical censure upon any devout man who broke over the linguistic 
bounds and preached to the poor people in their native tongue, and to 
prevent the circulation of the few translations of the Bible. The Latin 
service helped to Romanize and papalize the Western Church. 

V. Four centers from which to study the progress of the early English 
nation and Church: 1. Canterbury, in Kent (597-620), to which London, in 
Essex, became subject. 2. York, in Northumbria, which held the chief 
sway under Edwin (617-633), Oswald, and Oswy, who conquered Penda of 
Mercia and heathenism (655). 3. Mercia, the middle country, which now 
rose to supremacy as a Christian realm under Ethelbald (716-757), and the 
more powerful OrTa (757-95), the first to grant Peter's pence to Rome: and 
Cenwulf (796-819), who lost power when Egbert became king of Wessex. 
4. Wessex, where king Ina (688-726) framed laws for Church and state, 
and Egbert (800-36) as overlord began the work of national unity which 
Alfred realized. 

VI. Previous to 673 each Christianized Saxon kingdom had its distinct, 
or national, Church, with its one diocese : now there was but one national 
Church, with more dioceses (soon sixteen), and in each a bishop, in such a 
city as London, York, Dorchester, Litchfield, Hereford, or Worcester. Over 
all was one archbishop, at Canterbury, for until 735 York was not an actual 
archbishopric. Theodore helped England to reach the later national unity. 
The kings met occasionally for alliance, arbitration, or the choice of a pri- 
mate, but their kingdoms were not united states. 



QUESTION OF PROGRESS— ARABIC LEARNING. 223 



Chapter XI. 

DEBATES AND CONQUESTS. 

Was there any mental and moral progress in Europe during 
the Middle Ages? The answer will depend on the point of 
view. Those who look off the height from which the early 
Church declined in learning, thought, faith, and life, and who 
account the long thousand years between Clovis and Luther as 
ill spent in regaining them, may deny it and slur the history. 
Those who start from the low level where the Germanic peo- 
ples entered the Church — where Celt, Frank, Saxon, and Norse 
began their new lives — and sympathetically attend them as 
they work their way out of barbarism and ignorance, into cul- 
ture and science, will admit the progress, and find an interest in 
tracing the upward steps. It took ages to make one of them a 
logician, and centuries more to Christianize his logic. The new 
pupil had not merely to overcome his barbarism ; he was often 
arrested on his way to school by invasions, wars, conquests of 
other barbarians. He was stripped of books and left half dead ; 
nor did the monks and missionaries who brought spiritual oil 
and wine to his wounds always have the best quality at hand. 

The political disturbances helped to prolong the intellectual 
darkness. Hence the wars which broke the empire of Charle- 
magne, and the Norse invasions, must be considered in eccle- 
siastical history. The Church was affected by them, for good 
and evil, as she had been by the more direct persecutions. 
The darkness was quite in proportion to their violence and ex- 
tent. It was thickest between the seventh and eleventh centu- 
ries. It was not coeval nor equal in all lands. It began to 
disperse when the Western nations became settled, and had no 
more barbaric invasions. It was dispelled by light coming 
mainly from Christian sources : certainly not from Arabic 
sources alone. 

The Christian Nestorians seem to have introduced Aristotle 



224 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

to the Arabs. The caliphs of Bagdad promoted the study of 
his writings, and researches into physical science. There was 
some advance in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, 
philosophy, and literature. Al Raschid, whose empire extended 
from the Indus to Gibraltar, and rivaled that of his friend 
Charlemagne, ordered a school to be attached to every mosque, 
and Nestorian superintendents were preferred, for they opposed 
image-worship, and Eutychianism. Al Maimon (808-33) had 
about him Greek and Nestorian scholars ; manuscripts were 
copied, books collected, and libraries established. His was the 
Augustan age of the Arabs. This culture passed into Spain, 
and flourished at Cordova (980), and other Mohammedan cities. 
Thence some torches of it were carried into the convents and 
lecture-rooms of Christian Europe, and blazed there with some 
profit. But with the few scientific truths there were many 
philosophical and religious errors. Those who most glorify the 
Arabic science, and depreciate the Christian learning of the 
period, do not really believe much of either. The one was 
greater in quantity, the other quite as good in quality: neither 
was free from errors and each had its truths. Arabic astrology 
was not more civilizing than ecclesiastical saint-worship ; alchemy 
ranks with transubstantiation in absurdity. 

The more enlightened Christians of the darker ages drew 
their knowledge from nature, the trivium and quadrivium, the 
creed, the Fathers, and the Bible. They were ages of tradi- 
tionalism rather than investigation and progress. Yet the 
questions arose, What did the Fathers believe? What did the 
early councils decree ? Hence there were earnest debates in 
which there flashed out some mental vigor. 

I. Debates of the Dark Ages.* 

I. Image-worship. Emblems, pictures, mosaics, and statues 
came gradually into Christian families and churches as orna- 
ments, memorials, and means of popular instruction. They 
became unduly reverenced. In 324 the Council of Elvira, in 



*The dispute concerning the Filioque (z. e., whether the Holy Spirit pro- 
ceeds from the Father and the Son) was mainly between the Greek and Latin 
Churches ; the Latins having added the Filioque to their creed in the fifth cen- 
tury. The controversies about celibacy, the papacy, and investitures, will be 
noticed in other chapters. 



DEBATES OF THE DARK AGES— ICONOCLASM. 225 

Spain, decreed that " pictures ought not to be in the churches, 
lest that which is adored be painted on the walls." But the 
innovations were multiplied. Objects of art were idolized, es- 
pecially in the East. Before them lights were placed, incense 
burnt, prayers said, and votive offerings presented. If these 
acts were not worship, the pagans might claim that they had 
not worshiped idols, but had adored God through the image. 
The Mohammedans cried aloud against the Christians as idola- 
ters. A reaction began. £ Three parties rose : the image-wor- 
shipers, for whom John of Damascus, the ablest theologian 
of his time (730), made his plea, saying that "pictures are the 
books of the unlearned ;" the image-breakers, or Iconoclasts, 
led by the Eastern emperor, Leo the Isaurian (729-41), whose 
persecution of the image-worshipers was intensified by several 
of his successors ; and the image-reverers, or the conservatives, 
who would neither bow to statues nor break them. ^ 

Iconoclasm raged in the East. Insurrections and fierce wars 
made the empire a prey for the Saracens. The monks, whose 
predecessors had been so violent against pagan idols, now suf- 
fered for their own love of images ; even artists, painters, statu- 
aries were at one time banished. Now one party and next the 
other held the throne. A partisan council at Nice, in 787, 
favored the invocation (douleid), rather than the adoration (la- 
treid), of images. But the distinction was idle, and it has ever 
since been practically useless. For such a shadowy line the 
multitude cared nothing. The council of Constantinople, in 870, 
excommunicated the Iconoclasts, who lost their cause. 

In the West Pope Gregory I had wished to sanctify art, make 
it a means of devotion, but not worship its forms. His conserv- 
ative views were sustained by Charlemagne, and the council 
of Frankfort (794), which boldly condemned the decree of Nice 
as a sanction of image-worship. Louis the Pious held a coun- 
cil at Paris, in 824, which allowed the use of pictures and 
statues, but sternly forbade any worship of them. France and 
Britain were the last to yield to the idolatry of art. 

The most vigorous Iconoclast in the West was Claudius, a 
native of Spain, a presbyter in 812, and nine years later the 
bishop of Turin, where he left a bright name for the Waldenses, 
and for all Christians who admire a careful expositor of Scrip- 
ture, an earnest reformer, and a shining light in a dark age. 

15 



t 



226 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

He removed the pictures and images from the churches in his 
diocese, disapproved of pilgrimages, denied the virtue of sign 
and form of the cross, questioned the supremacy of the pope, 
and held that originally bishops and presbyters were of equal 
rank. ,// In such reforms an active part was taken by bishop 
Agobard of Lyons (813-40), a Spaniard by birth and a man of 
rare mental endowments and learning. He opposed supersti- 
tions about witchcraft, the notion that gifts to churches would 
avert diseases and sins, prayers to saints and angels, and all 
those barbarous ordeals which paganism brought into the courts 
of justice. 

An Augustinian, he stood forward to revive a more truly 
Christian spirit in the members of the Church. But, after all, 
the images finally gained the victory in the West, and held 
their sway until the Zwinglians, Huguenots, and Puritans asso- 
ciated idolized art with popery and became Iconoclasts. 

2. Adoptionism. The Mohammedans were quite tolerant of 
the Nestorian view of Christ's person. This may have led two 
Spanish bishops, Felix of Urgel, and Elipandus of Toledo, to 
teach that Christ, as God, was by nature, and truly, the Son of 
God ; but as man he was the Son of God only in name, and 
by adoption. This was thought to savor of the Nestorian 
error. Felix recanted under trial, but returned to his heresy. 
From 785 to 820 the Western synods took pains to condemn 
the doctrine, and it soon disappeared. 

3. Inspiration. The nobleman, Fredegis, a learned forerun- 
ner of the scholastic theology, maintained that the very words 
of Holy Scripture were inspired by the Divine Spirit. Probably 
most of the bishops held to verbal inspiration. Agobard, of 
Lyons, argued that the Holy Ghost imparted not diction, not 
"the bodily words upon the lips," but the sense of them, the 
thoughts or ideas. He also surprised many men by saying that 
the New Testament contained some inaccuracies of grammar. 
Nobody arraigned him for heresy. He urged a diligent study 
of the Bible. 

A subtle philosophy was brought into the controversies of 
the West by John Scotus Erigena (Irishman), the adviser and 
confidant of the French king, Charles the Bald (869-77), who 
had some of the tastes of his grandfather, Charlemagne. John 
was the teacher of the court-school. He was "the enigma and 



JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA. 227 

wonder of his time. He suddenly comes and all at once disap- 
pears, so that we know not Avhence he came nor whither he 
went. He was undoubtedly the most learned man, and the 
deepest, boldest, and most independent thinker, of his age, in 
which he was neither understood nor appreciated, and he was 
scarcely deemed even worthy of being declared a heretic." The 
churchmen of Paris rectified the omission in 1209, and burnt 
some of his books and pantheistic followers. Though he wished 
to retain some of the essential doctrines of Christianity, his 
system was one great heterodoxy, based upon Plato, Aristotle, 
Plotinus, and himself. Theology and philosophy were, in his 
view, merely forms of the same truth. He said: "Authority 
springs from reason, not reason from authority." He was the 
Western writer who used logic as a means of discovering truths. 
His philosophy was rationalistic; his pantheism foreran that of 
Hegel. The French king directed him into a new field. "It 
is a startling feature of the times that one, whose theories were 
so divergent from the teaching of the Church, was called to 
speak as an authority on two of the most awful topics of the 
faith. These were the doctrines of Predestination and the 
Eucharist, which, owing to the great activity of thought engen- 
dered in the Carlovingian schools, were now discussed with 
unwonted vehemence." These let us notice. 

4. The Predestinarian Controversy. Gottschalk, the son of a 
Saxon count, was early devoted by his parents to the monastic 
life, and trained at Fulda, partly under the then abbot Rabanus 
Maurus. He next was in the monastery of Orbais, near Sois- 
sons, where he studied Augustine and put forth the doctrine of 
a twofold predestination, one to salvation, the other to condem- 
nation, each absolute and unconditional, but not fatalistic. Of 
this doctrine and its correlatives he became a champion. 
Against him the chief was Rabanus Maurus, of ancient Roman 
blood, a pupil of Alcuin, a leading theologian of his time, a 
popular teacher at Fulda, a busy author, and finally archbishop 
of Mayence (died 856). His doctrine of predestination was 
Semi-Pelagian, although he quoted largely from Augustine and 
Prosper. A synod at Mayence condemned Gottschalk, who 
was handed over to his archbishop, Hincmar, of Rheims, a 
nobly born, talented, courageous, proud, energetic, violent man 
of great influence, and very zealous for the Gallican liberties 



228 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

for which he did noble service against Pope Nicholas. Always 
in controversy, he was not likely to deal tenderly with the poor 
Saxon monk. He secured another synodical condemnation of 
Gottschalk in 849 at Kiersy, and had him excommunicated. 
In the spirit of the time, Gottschalk offered to test the truth of 
his doctrines by the ordeal, and after being plunged into cal- 
drons of boiling water, oil, and pitch, to walk through a blazing 
pile. This challenge was not accepted, but in the presence of 
King Charles the monk was flogged and made to throw his 
book into the fire, which he had hardly strength to do. Then 
he was cast into a monastic prison, where he suffered coura- 
geously almost twenty years under the ban of heresy. 

Meanwhile the whole Western Church was enlisted in the 
controversy, and Hincmar was assailed for his extreme harsh- 
ness. Rabanus Maurus forsook him. New writers threw in 
their pamphlets. It grew too warm for Hincmar, and he sought 
the aid of the freethinker John Scotus, who came out with the 
doctrine of "the Eternal Now," on the basis that all time is 
present with God, and that strictly there can be no foreordination. 
Predestination is but the will of God in activity; it is one and 
can not be twofold. It is positive only in reference to what is 
good. At length, when synods failed to reconcile parties, 
Bishop Remi, of Lyons, a friend of the prisoner, moved to refer 
the subject to a future council, and that special council was 
never held. Gottschalk appealed to the eminent Pope Nicholas ; 
the pope cited Hincmar to go to Rome, but he refused to 
obey, and for once he was in the right as a free Gallic bishop. 
No decree opened the door of liberty to Gottschalk. He died 
in prison 868, and Hincmar refused him burial in consecrated 
ground. Meanwhile the same parties were deep in another 
dispute. 

5. The Eucharistic Controversy. Paschasius Radbert, once 
the master of a convent-school, was in 844 the abbot of the 
French Corbey. He had opposed Gottschalk. His ardent 
piety and traditionalism led him to draw up for his monks a 
little service-book on the Lord's Supper. In this he broached 
the views which finally matured in the doctrine of transubstan- 
tiation. He taught "that in the Lord's Supper, after the conse- 
cration, there remained only the form and appearance of bread 
and wine; and that the real body, or the flesh and blood of 



RATRAM— BERENGAR. 229 

Christ, were present." He would not refuse the cup to the 
laity, as did his later followers. He laid his book before King 
Charles, who soon found that this theory was a novelty. It 
excited surprise and alarm. Charles requested Ratram (Ber- 
tram) to examine it. This young monk was in the convent 
with Radbert, and devoted to the writings of Augustine. At 
Charles's request he had already written in favor of Gottschalk. 
He now stated that in the Eucharist the elements are not 
changed as to form or substance, but the change is spiritual 
and potential; and that in them the body and blood of Christ 
are presented, not to the bodily senses, but to the faithful soul. 
He held to a real, but not a corporeal presence. This view was 
taught by Elfric, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the next century. 
The book of Ratram was first printed in England, 1532, and 
was highly valued by the Calvinistic reformers. It led Bishop 
Ridley, the martyr, to a right view of the Lord's Supper. 

It seems that King Charles sought the opinion of John 
Scotus, who saw little more in this sacrament than a memorial 
of the absent body of the Lord, or a remembrancer of those 
Christian truths which nourish the believer's soul; a view often 
imputed to the reformer Zwingli. Rabanus Maurus, and the 
more learned men of that age, generally, opposed the doctrine 
of Radbert; but as it bore the appearance of reverential piety, 
and harmonized with the prevailing love of the miraculous, it 
grew into favor. 

In the eleventh century the doctrine of Ratram created sur- 
prise when it was revived by Berengar, the master of a thriving 
cathedral school, at his native Tours, and then Archdeacon of 
Angers (1040-1088). He had a free mind and was not afraid 
to read the works of John Scotus, though told that John was a 
heretic. He took Ambrose and Augustine as solid authorities, 
and became an able theologian in that "very dark century." 
His former fellow-student, Adelman, warned him against spread- 
ing his opinions, lest he should cause scandal and enmity; but 
the brave man soon sent forth a book, which was widely circu- 
lated by men who had been poor lads, educated at his cost in 
his school. It was burnt and lost for ages, until Lessing found 
it in our century. No other monk in that age raised such a 
commotion as did Berengar. About him we might range kings, 
bishops, councils, and popes, and even the Norman invasion of 



230 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

England. For Lanfranc, who went to the chair of Canterbury, 
and Hildebrand, who became the great pontiff at Rome, were 
at first his friends. Lanfranc became his earnest opponent.* 
Now acquitted and again condemned; now in prison and again 
at Rome to answer charges of heresy; now compromising or 
even recanting his views, and once more asserting them, poor 
Berengar grew sick of tribulation, sore with self-reproach for 
his want of heroism, and retired to an island in the river near 
Tours, lived as a hermit and died neglected. But he was not 
forgotten. Down to late times a company of people met once 
every year at his tomb to honor his name. 

II. Norse Invasions. 

The Churches of Britain had no active part in the contro- 
versies just noticed. Their great conflicts were entirely different. 
They had to struggle for the right of existence. Bede was 
scarcely fifty years in his grave when the Northmen turned 
their thoughts to a long battle for life, and when theology, 
science, schools, Churches, art, literature, civilization, were ar- 
rested in their progress. We must count three hundred years 
of Norse pillaging and conquest — all in the providence of 
God — before the Northmen ceased from Vikingism and perma- 
nently settled English affairs in their victorious way. Here and 
there a man like Alfred brought "a little reviving in the bond- 
age;" but he prolonged, rather than shortened, the period of 
Norse aggression, f 

This vast movement — one of the greatest in history — had 
three stages in England: (i) that of plundering expeditions, 
from about 787 to 855, when Northmen landed upon every 
coast, surprised towns, pillaged churches, burnt monasteries, 

*Note at the end of this chapter. 

t Read the Anglo-Saxon chronicle from the year 787 to 1087, and mark the 
many times and places of robbery, flame, and conquest. Here are a few sam- 
ples : 794. The heathens ravaged among the Northumbrians, and plundered 
Egfert's monastery. 851. The heathen men first wintered in Thanet ; three 
hundred and fifty ships came to the mouth of the Thames. 870. In Mercia the 
Danes got the victory, slew the king (Edmund), subdued the land, and destroyed 
all the churches they came to. 871. Nine general battles fought south of the 
Thames. 910. Danes greatly ravaged along the Severn. 991. Ipswich ravaged; 
tribute first paid to Danish men on account of great terror which they caused 
by the sea-coast. 1010. The Danes burnt Thetford and Cambridge. All North- 
men, or Scandinavians, were often called Danes. 



NORSE INVASIONS. 23 I 

reveled in crime, loaded their black boats with goods and cap- 
tives, and sailed away ; (2) that of settlement, along with more 
Viking ravages, through the next one hundred and fifty years, 
during which Norse colonies expanded, old kingdoms lost their 
boundaries, Danes carved out provinces for themselves, the 
conquerors assumed Christianity, and tried to live as English- 
men with the conquered, yet intent upon having their Anglo- 
Norse bishops, aldermen, and generals ; (3) that of royalty, 
when Danish kings ruled from 1017 to 1042, and, after Edward 
the Confessor, came William the Norman in 1066, with his 
feudalism, bishops, and Domesday Book. If there had not 
been a tenacity and toughness in the English character, we 
should find no survival of Anglo-Saxon Church, law, language, 
or civilization. 

There were immense losses of property and life, of homes 
and social bliss. The heathen Dane slew the Christian Saxon, 
as the heathen Saxon once slaughtered the Christian Briton. 
Women had griefs which they wished untold. ' ' There was 
warfare and sorrow all over England." Invasion often became 
persecution, especially in Ireland, where pagan Danes had early 
colonies of Ostmen (785), who pressed inland, while sea-rovers 
desolated the coasts. Irish monks, creeping out of the marshes, 
handed down the awful story of the ruin of churches, convents, 
schools, four universities, books, harps, happiness ; of poets, 
teachers, musicians, and priests hiding in the woods ; and of 
Erin's crown on the head of a Norse tyrant at Dublin ; all end- 
ing in the amalgamation of races, and a lower type of Chris- 
tianity. The Scots have told their woes with a like monotony. 
Culdeeism was paralyzed. Iona lost her glory (806), and the 
very bones of Columba. The isles at the north of it were 
homes and naval stations of the Vikings. Even the Hebrides 
paid tribute to a line of Norse kings (870-1266) on the Isle of 
Man. From Caithness to Lindisfarne the Northmen swept the 
coasts. Where were they not masters of the North, except in 
the wild districts so famous for the Highlanders, who there took 
refuge, kept pure their Celtic blood, and long retained their 
rudeness, their clanship, and their brave habit of plundering 
their neighbors?* Is it any wonder that Culdee light grew 



*The Anglo-Danish province of Lothian seems to be the basis of the later 
Scotland. 



232 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

dim in history? Yet rays of it entered the fierce Norse heart. 
Vikings met with sad hermits, assumed Christianity, led their 
crews and subjects to holy altars, and bore some coals of it 
away to their father-land. 

England was long surrounded with lawless Vikingism ; and 
yet her Christianity, law, kingship, courage, were to have the 
largest part in subduing it, and with it the Norse Paganism. 
It brought evils ; it wrought good. The best effects were these : 
a stronger union of the Scots and Picts in one Scottish king- 
dom ; political unity of the English under the Wessex crown 
for two hundred years (802-1002) ; the erasure of the old hep- 
tarchy from the English map ; the development of Anglo-Saxon 
energies ; the creation of an English navy, and the rise of for- 
eign commerce ; the baptism of the invaders, who built again 
the churches they had burnt; the solidarity of the two families 
of the same race ; the conversion of Norway, with the final 
repression of Vikingism ; and the rearing of noble men who 
conserved the English Church, law, and life. These results 
were largely due to the most eminent West-Saxon kings, and 
to their wisest Norse successors. 

With this light on their position we may understand the 
men on whom so much depended. In 802 Egbert returned 
from an exile at the court and palatine school of Charlemagne, 
and took the crown of Wessex. He won the overlordship of 
all England, and styled himself "King of the English," as no 
other man had yet dared to do. At his death, in 839, he might 
have left to Ethelwulf a firm nationality, had it not been for 
the Northmen. He mapped his grand scheme on the sand, 
and the Norse storm washed it out. Every Saxon realm was 
falling into Norse hands, and three crowned sons of Ethelwulf, 
with the warlike Bishop Alstane, barely saved Wessex from 
wreck. Its brave people needed a wiser, more inspiring leader. 
No one could yet name the remaining son, Alfred, as the hope 
of state and Church. 

Alfred was born at Wantage in 849, just four hundred years 
after Hengist is said to have landed on the gravel at Ebbsfleet. 
No human arm then pushed back the Saxon ; would any one 
now drive off the Dane ? Could Alfred ? Heroism was not his 
young dream. Not patriotism, but religion, was his early 
lesson ; nor was it the religion that best makes a patriot. It 



DISMAL OUTLOOK. 233 

was that of his father, who was half monk at times, a good 
fighter alongside of Bishops Alstane and Swithin against the 
Danes, but more happy on his pilgrimage to Rome. He might 
there report that he had given large lands for his ' ' own eternal 
salvation." He there found Pope Leo IV inclosing the Vatican 
against Moorish pirates, who were helping to imperil Christen- 
dom. This pope may have anointed little Alfred, six years 
old, as future king of the West-Saxons. If the lad came with 
his aged father to the court of King Charles the Bald, he was 
scarcely profited by the debates of Gottschalk, Radbert, and 
Scotus, nor by the wedding which made the clever girl Judith 
his step-mother. At sixteen she was a widow, and very soon 
the wife of her step-son, Ethelbald. The scandals of this royal 
pair justly caused a public horror and loud noise. Alfred was 
the gainer, if thenceforth he was ' ' left to grow up pretty much 
as he chose." All this is the most we know about his first 
outline of religious studies ; perhaps his good mother Osberga 
had led him in diviner ways. If she really gave him a book 
of Saxon poetry for committing it to memory, he may have 
grown warm with patriotic songs. In his manhood he had, 
deep in his soul, the love of country and the love of God. 

Not simply in religion, but also in kingship, he had to find 
the higher wisdom for himself. ' ' Tribulation worketh experi- 
ence," and hope cometh later. In 871 Egbert's crown pressed 
his brow, but Egbert's failure grieved his heart. The outlook 
was dismal. A great famine, plague among men, pest among 
cattle, were scarcely over ; good King Edmund slain in the hot 
fight with Guthrun and four other heathen Vikings, who so 
covered East Anglia that Prince Edwold left crown and realm 
to the pagan church -burners, went into a Dorset monastery, 
and ''there led a hermit's life on bread and water;" more 
Danes coming, with the Raven fitly on their standards; the 
Thames full of their black galleys, and Wessex towns on fire 
by their raiding horsemen ; theft, riot, panic every-where ; and 
yet one royal leader who might say, as his brave alderman had 
shouted at Englefield, " Forward, men, and at them; our cap- 
tain, Christ, is braver than they." That hero fell; yet the 
long war went on, Alfred having some triumphs, "for he too 
relied on the help of God." 

Later story-tellers may have lapsed into myths in their rec- 



234 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ord of Alfred's experience. Yet they may give us roots of 
fact when they tell how he yielded to evil impulses ; ruled with 
too hard a hand ; laid too heavy service on the yeomanry ; 
was too heedless of the preacher's rebuke and the poor man's 
cry ; drove petitioners from court and camp ; hanged men on 
slight charges, or let justices have too much power; lost pop- 
ularity ; saw nobles and people forsaking him ; and then left 
them to find out his value by suddenly hiding in the marshes 
of Athelnay, where the neat-herd's wife scolded him for his 
failure in cake-baking. They tell how "the Righteous Judge 
willed that his sin should not go unpunished in this world, to 
the end that he might spare him in the world to come. There- 
fore King Alfred often fell into such great misery that some- 
times none of his subjects knew where he was, or what had 
become of him." Misery deep and seclusion enough, no doubt; 
yet he may have been hedged by the Danes in some ravine or 
swamp — a Saxon Washington wintering painfully at his Valley 
Forge — and neither office-seekers nor monks were likely to hear 
of him until he cut his way out. 

The certain fact is, that his people finally rallied, and that 
he was long years in deciding the contest between Christian 
Saxon and heathen Dane, and so ending it that Christianity 
was triumphant and English civilization preserved. Guthrun 
and his folk were granted East Anglia, where they learned 
Christ as he was best known in those days.* Hasting, who 
had been treated magnanimously, but had broken every oath 
made on the shoulder-blade of a horse, was so beaten that he 
came not again to ravage the coasts. Rollo was sent off to 
France, there to make Normandy a home for other Vikings ; 
thus sparing England for nearly two hundred years, but rearing 
men who would bring her a Conquest worth mentioning. 
These are samples of the policy by which the English nation 
and Church were relieved for a time. When the Norse storm 
lulled for a year or two, or passed by to other lands, Alfred 
came forth in the character which has most impressed the 
whole Germanic race ; for he was a royal patriarch and teacher 



* So Theodosius settled the Goths in Thrace, and they reared Alaric and 
conquerors in the very empire which sheltered them. These Anglo -Danes 
would yet furnish an Alaric in Sweyn and a Theodoric in Canute, although the 
men were of foreign birth. 



A LIFE OF WORTHINESS. 235 

of his people. We find him with his books, his pen, his in- 
vented lantern, his harp, his merry children, his artisans and 
farmers, his schools and lawmakers, his Bible and his prayers. 
All his life was one of illnesses ; and yet he usually had a 
cheerful heart, hopeful soul, devout spirit, and busy hand. He 
reminds us of King David in his various trials and activities. 
Yet he is not understood by comparing him with the brilliant 
names of antiquity. He stands quite alone in the moral grand- 
eur of his life and aims. He has been described as the first 
really Christian king, the only English king entitled ' ' the 
Great." It was no boast for him to say to those who listened 
for his last golden words, ' ' I have striven to live worthily. I 
desire to leave to the men who come after me a remembrance 
of me in good works." That remembrance has come down 
through the ages. Monarchs have seen what a life of worthi- 
ness means. It has been imitated by rulers and yeomen. Far 
away, children are fired by the story of it. Missionaries tell 
it, and so its light goes round the world. He saw his own 
defects, and tried to remedy them. He saw what England 
needed, and labored to meet the want. 

1. In national affairs he sought to rescue, defend, unify, and 
greaten England. He was an organizer. He created a navy, 
made good roads, repaired fortresses, brought London up from 
the ashes, and started it on the way to universal commerce. 
His long lost and curious jewel bears the words, "Alfred made 
me." This might almost be said of England. Her realms be- 
came one nation. Her zest for exploration was begun. Alfred 
sent out a Norse shipmaster far up toward the North Pole, 
perhaps with a kindly message to the Icelanders. Envoys bore 
his presents to Rome and Jerusalem, and he may have sent 
alms to the poor Christians of St. Thomas in India, as Charle- 
magne had sent donations to the suffering Churches of Africa 
and Palestine. 

2. He worked his way out of ignorance, and gave an 
impetus to popular education and literature. In the face of 
skepticism we must think that he could read, write, and per- 
sonally make translations from Latin into his mother -tongue. 
He kept his note-books, made quotations of all sorts, proverbs 
of wise men, sentences from Augustine, now a story, then a 
prayer, with many a good song. His schemes of education 



236 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

were quite like those of Charlemagne. They were the last vig- 
orous attempts at popular enlightenment during the Middle Ages. 
The Northumbrian schools and literature had gone down in the 
Norse deluge. Aldhelm's lights were no longer burning in Wes- 
sex. No abbot Hadrian lectured at Canterbury. "When I 
began to reign," he says, "I can not remember a man south of 
the Thames who could explain his [Latin] service book in En- 
glish. " To remedy this ignorance he had his court-school for 
the nobles — even the dignified aldermen — and he superintended 
it. He imported teachers, such as the monk Asser, of Wales ; 
Plegmund and Werfrith, of Mercia ; Grimbald, of France, a 
fine musician, a priest well versed in Scripture and theology for 
one in that age ; and John (not Scotus but) the Saxon of Cor- 
bey. He lamented that the former English scholars had left 
every thing in Latin, and began to act as translator, editor, and 
author. He took what he could find ; sucfi books as the Pas- 
torals of Pope Gregory, the Consolations of Boethius, ^Esop's 
fables, the histories of Bede and Orosius, and, best of all, the 
Hebrew Psalms. By rather free paraphrase, he threw into most 
of his translations what he thought his people ought to know; 
here explaining his theory of government, and there breaking 
out against the abuses of power. "The cold providence of 
Boethius gives way to an enthusiastic acknowledgment of the 
goodness of God." No doubt, when he went to the church — 
often far in the night — to pray and hear the solemn chants, he 
wished the time soon to come when the service might be 
heard in English, and the people lift their prayers in their 
mother-tongue to God, and the very peasants read His Word to 
them in their own language. He was anxious that schools 
should be founded in which the children should each "abide 
at his book till he could well understand English writing." 

3. His legislation. In it the moral element prevailed. He 
made the best use of what was at hand. The laws of Offa and 
Ina were amended and rendered more humane.* The Ten 
Commandments and part of the Mosaic code were made a part 
of the law of the land. Labor on Sundays and on the Church 

*The Chancellor Swithin had died in 862, but he had "contributed to the 
consolidation of the States of the Heptarchy into one great kingdom," says 
Lord Campbell. Alfred had no such chancellor in his reign. The next great 
chancellor was Alfred's grandson, Turketel, a shorn priest and quite learned 
man in the reign of Athelstan. 



THE TRUTH-TELLER. 237 

holidays was forbidden. Women of every class, especially 
nuns, were carefully protected from insult. Monks must not 
be idle and vicious, they must go to work educating the people 
in the villages. The clergy might have wives and good homes 
among their parishioners. Bishops must keep within their 
dioceses, visit and preach to some purpose. Half of the reve- 
nues was devoted to the poor, to public schools, and to the 
public worship of the Church. The condition of serfs and 
slaves was mitigated ; the cottagers had the sympathies of the 
king ; the poor never forgot their benefactor. The whole gov- 
ernment of state and Church must do the greatest good to the 
greatest number. He had a keen eye for the best men to do 
any needed work. Judges must be hanged if they caused "the 
scales of justice to be swayed by bribes." He reviewed their 
acts and decisions. He seems to have sent some judges to the 
gibbet for condemning men to death without the consent of the 
entire jury. He probably did not introduce, but rather modified 
the trial by jury, as well as certain other modes of legal admin- 
istration attributed to him. He laid stress on the maxim 
that "every man is to be considered innocent until he is 
proved guilty." 

One account is, that when he was dying, in 901, he called to 
him Edward, whom he had carefully reared with all his chil- 
dren in God's fear and love, and said, "My dear son, sit now 
down beside me, and I will deliver to thee the true counsel. 
My son, I feel that my hour is near, my face is pale, my days 
are nearly run. We must soon part, I shall go to another 
world, and thou shalt be left alone with all my wealth. I pray 
thee, for thou art my dear child, strive to be a father and a lord 
to thy people ; be the children's father, the widow's friend ; 
comfort the poor, shelter the weak ; and with all thy might 
do thou right whatever is wrong. And, my son, govern thy- 
self by law, then shall the Lord love thee, and God, above all 
things, shall be thy reward. Call upon him to advise thee in 
all thy need, and so he shall help thee the better to compass 
what thou wouldst." And so departed "the Peaceable, the 
Truth-teller," "England's Darling." 

His bones are dust, 

His good sword rust, 

His soul is with the saints, we trust. 



238 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

To his successors he left his ideal of life, law, and of a 
Church quite theocratic, and it was not entirely lost. His 
daughter, Ethelfleda, was the brilliant Queen of Mercia. Ed- 
ward pushed his overlordship into Scotland. Athelstan con- 
tributed to the conversion of Norway. These kings were busy 
in fighting down Scots, Danes, and Welsh. Where they won, 
the English Church must hold her sway. Their successors 
were overshadowed by Dunstan, a monk who rose to the posi- 
tion of an archbishop, a reformer, a statesman, a dictator, and 
who was the great English character of his time. 

III. The Policy of Dunstan. 

The Anglo-Saxon had disliked rigid monasticism, and the 
unpopular system had declined. Celibacy was not congenial to 
the English. The more free parish priests were honest enough 
to have wives. Many of the convents became the home of a 
half monastic, married clergy. About the cathedrals were the 
houses of the canons, many of whom were married. Among 
all the clergy were vices which needed correction, and the true 
reform would have been to take away, not marriage, but monas- 
ticism ; not their freedom, but their slavery. The wrong method 
was attempted by the man who did most to complete the 
supremacy of the West-Saxon realm — not a king, nor warrior, 
but a priest. ''Dunstan stands first in the line of ecclesiastical 
statesmen, who counted among them Lanfranc and Wolsey, 
and ended in Laud. He is still more remarkable in himself, in 
his own vivid personality, after eight centuries of revolution 
and change." Born in Glastonbury, of noble parents, in 925, 
he was there educated by Irish monks in no small amount of 
secular and sacred learning. He became the wonder of that 
region in scholarship, in copying manuscripts, in music, archi- 
tecture, painting, modeling sculptures, and working in metals, 
and the people thought him a magician. As a monk he made 
his cell his workshop with its forge. He refused a bishopric, 
and became abbot of Glastonbury. He ruined the peace of 
Edwy's court, and was for some time an exile in France. 
Under Edgar he returned and became the leading man in 
Church and state, for he was not only Archbishop of Canter- 
bury (959-988), but royal counselor, when not in exile. No 
doubt that, in many respects, the prime minister was a wise 



TWO SORTS OF CLERGY. 239 

statesman, and with a stern hand he secured a higher degree 
of order and justice. But the zeal that most concerns our his- 
tory was in the sphere of the Church. 

1. There were two sorts of clergy: the regular (named from 
the regula, or convent rule) were monks ordained to preach; 
the seadar were parish priests, often married, and living in 
country homes, or houses about the cathedrals. They were 
called worldly, for the idea had come, that to be "religious" 
was to be monastic. No doubt many, but we hope not most 
of them, were corrupt in morals and negligent of pastoral duties. 
Yet domestic life was not the cause of the evils charged upon 
the clergy. Probably many of the married clergy were tillers 
of fields, carpenters, and teachers of some sort, in order to 
earn a living. Their sermons were plain talks, and they made 
sad work of the Latin liturgy. They w r ere still the best citi- 
zens of the towns and on the manors. They lived among the 
people. Their wives shared in the joys and sorrows of the 
women around them. Their children, says Charles Knight, 
went in the troops of young villagers to gather May blossoms, 
or bring in the Christmas evergreens for the Church; or stood 
with them when the curate taught his classes the creed and the 
Lord's prayer, and when the bishop confirmed those who were 
fourteen years of age. These poor clergymen and their fami- 
lies were the best bonds of society. Their civilizing influence 
had some good bearing on the public morals. They loved their 
country and their homes. All this Dunstan would overthrow. 
He would put in their places the monkish priests who were 
not at all likely to improve society in any high degree. A re- 
form was needed, but his method was wrong. The effort was 
to silence the seculars, part them from their dependent families, 
force them into convents, or drive them out of the land. For 
a morsel of bread they must renounce their natural and Scrip- 
tural liberties. This movement raised an uproar, and almost a 
civil war. It was the first English battle for Church power. 
The seculars acted, each according to his bold independence, 
or his fears, his spirit of self-sacrifice or his cringing obedience, 
while the wives raised a loud protest. 2. Dunstan restored the 
Benedictine Order in England, under a modified rule. It had 
long ago ceased at Jarrow, where the Norse wanted no monks. 
He hoped to bring the idle and vicious inmates of religious 



240 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

houses to a life of industry and morality. Bands of married 
priests and seculars were to be thrust out, and a host of Bene- 
dictines was brought from the Continent to invade the convents, 
churches, and parishes of the land. King and pope aided the 
reformer, who, after all, was reforming nothing. He dared not 
begin at home, and make the change of monks and clergy at 
his own Canterbury. Only a few cathedrals made the change. 
The English Church would not permit the revolution, not even 
when a synod declared for it. A reaction came, and the secu- 
lars had to be tolerated. But the wide distinction was drawn 
between the two sorts of clergy, and it will again crop out in 
Wyclif's time. 

Something was done to elevate the Benedictines and the 
clergy by one of the two ^Elfrics (iooo), whose name shines out 
of the mists which long obscured it, and is credited with these 
attempts at popular instruction, namely: (i) His homilies, in- 
tended for the parish priests to read to the people. Preaching 
had nearly ceased. He compiled sermons from such Fathers 
as Augustine, Jerome, Gregory, and from the English Bede, 
and translated them into Anglo-Saxon. The course was for 
the Sundays of a year. "Be very careful of heresy," said his 
archbishop, Sigeric, who was not so alarmed about ignorance. 
These were used for a time in some quarters, but were labeled 
"old and useless books" in the thirteenth century, when Latin 
was essential to orthodoxy. (2) He prepared an English gram- 
mar; very timely, but new editions were hardly in demand. 
(3) He translated parts of the Bible, but more was not wanted 
by the ruling clergy. He did not find therein, nor teach, tran- 
substantiation,* a doctrine which was afterwards carried into 
England by Lanfranc. But the Church was not aroused; "no 
ecclesiastical synod, no Church reform, broke the slumbers of 
the clergy." 

Politicians were awake when Sweyn of Denmark contrived 
to get the mastery of England (1013), and consigned her throne 
to his son Canute (1017-37), who was the Charlemagne of the 
North, with Denmark and Norway iiT his empire. His most 
devout act was a pilgrimage to Rome. There he secured some 
benefits to merchants and to other pilgrims, but the pope was 
hardly willing to lessen his exactions from English bishops. 

*Note at the end of this Chapter. 



THE CONVERSION OF NORWAY— HAKON THE GOOD. 24 1 

He was such a friend to the Church, at home and abroad, that 
the old song ran, 

" Merrily sang the monks of Ely 
When King Canute was sailing by." 

IV. The Conversion of Norway. 

AVhile the stream of Norse people was breaking over Eng- 
land, there was a counter-current of English Christianity thrown 
into Scandinavia. Anskar and his disciples could not win the 
fierce Jarls of Norway. These sons of Wodin, each swearing by 
Thor in every fight with his neighbor, were first brought under 
kingship by Harold Harfagr (fair-haired, 860-933), but no 
wholesale conversion was to be expected through him. His 
part in the divine plan was to ' ' bring chaos a little nearer to 
the form of cosmos," reduce the Jarls to an incipient unity 
which rendered civilization possible, and then, by some whim, 
send his youngest son over to King Athelstan, in Wessex. 
This bright lad, Hakon, was there carefully educated, baptized, 
freighted with some just ideas of kingship, and . sent home. 
At Trondhiem the Free Assembly admitted his right to the 
crown, ' ' the news of which flew over Norway like fire through 
dried grass;" and the reign of Eric Blood-ax was suddenly 
ended. 

Thus Hakon the Good (934-61) came to be a royal mis- 
sionary 7 as well as a wise law-maker, and defender of his realm. 
English preachers and bishops came over, taught wherever they 
got hearers, and lamented their slow progress. There were 
two special outbreaks of opposition. When the zealous king 
kept Christmas with the converted members of his court, the 
pagan chiefs held their Yule-tide festival, with sacrifices and 
revels. They stormfully demanded his presence with them. 
He yielded so far as to take a cup of Yule-beer, make over it 
the sign of the cross, and drink it. Another outbreak came 
from the people. When he announced that they must become 
Christians, renounce their sacrifices and idols, keep holy Sun- 
day, with thoughtful rest and saintly fast, they muttered their 
dissent. "What! take from us our old belief and our time 
for labor! How can the land be tilled, and we get our bread?" 
So it was then urged, as often since, that Sunday laws fall hard 
on the poor, who need the full seven days for toil! A Yule- 

16 



242 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

beer party, and a No-Sunday party, with heathenism as the 
main principle, are not entirely modern. 

They worried Hakon long, and when he fell bravely in bat- 
tle they buried him in heathen fashion. They held on their 
way until the reign of Olaf Trygveson (995-1000), who had 
been a sea-rover, had met some mournful hermit on an isle 
near England, received baptism, and talked with Bishop Elfege, 
who baptized him again, when he honestly promised King Eth- 
elred never to plunder in England any more. Carlyle says: 
"If soft methods would not serve, then by hard and even 
hardest he put down a great deal of miscellaneous anarchy in 
Norway; was especially busy against heathenism (devil-worship 
and its rites) ; this, indeed, may be called the focus and heart 
of his royal endeavor." Many of the peasants soon consented 
to baptism and Sabbath-keeping. The Yule party were clam- 
orous for him to attend the next great sacrificial feast at Trond- 
hiem. He promised to be there. He took pains to make the 
occasion splendid. He invited guests from all quarters, gave 
them a royal banquet of a somewhat Christian kind, and then 
had eleven chief pagans arrested, saying to them, in effect, 
"Since I am to be a heathen again, and do sacrifice, I propose 
to do it in the highest form, that of human sacrifice; and this 
time not of slaves and malefactors, but of the best men in the 
country." The eleven saw at once, as never before, the horrible 
crime of sacrificing human life to the gods, and along with a 
multitude they accepted baptism, left hostages in the king's 
hands, went home, and there listened more prudently, if not 
more heartily, to such missionaries as the king sent, and to 
him when he visited them. 

There was more mildness in the character, if not the meas- 
ures, of Olaf the Saint (1017-33), who had learned the Christian 
faith in some of his Viking cruises ; perhaps in England. Thence 
he brought preachers and bishops; one of them was Grimkil, 
who drew up a code of ecclesiastical law. ' ' Vikingism proper 
had to cease in Norway; still more, heathenism, under penal- 
ties too severe to be borne ; death, mutilation of limb, not to 
mention forfeiture and less rigorous coercion." The king fell 
in battle and was honored as the patron saint of his country, 
and his name was given to churches. 

Norway passed into the empire of Canute the Great, who 



THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 243 

sent thither the first Benedictines known there, and favored the 
primacy of Canterbury over all the Norse Churches. But the 
German clergy asserted Anskar's right of pre-emption. Adel- 
bert, the Archbishop of Bremen, pressed forward his bishops 
and established sees in Norway. The difference was slight. 
They were all Romanized. On his pilgrimage to Rome, 1026, 
Canute allied the Danish Church to the papacy. 

Ever since 865 Iceland had been a refuge for adventurers, 
criminals, and families who left Norway to escape the rigors of 
both pagan and Christian kings. The first royal Olaf sent 
thither "one Thangbrand, priest from Saxony, of wonderful 
qualities, military as well as theological," who made a few con- 
verts, killed two or three men, and returned saying that the 
Icelanders were a satirical, stubborn, inconvertible people. A 
better man, Thormond, was sent, and in the year 1000 the free 
assembly at Thingvalla enthusiastically voted Christianity to be 
the religion of their republic — one that still flourishes. They 
established a Christian colony in Greenland. Probably they 
often touched our Atlantic Coast, and their Vinland seems to 
have been in America, somewhere between Martha's Vineyard 
and Chesapeake Bay. The Icelanders best preserved the tradi- 
tions of the Norse people. From their Sagas {says) come the 
fullest accounts of their old mythology, and of early Scandi- 
navian history. 

V. The Norman Conquest. 

Viking Rollo had sailed away from his three little Vigten 
Isles, near the upper coast of Norway, made no very trouble- 
some call on King Alfred, pushed his boats up the Seine to 
Rouen (911), and treated with Charles the Simple for the lower 
valley. Thither he drew other sea-rovers, settled them in lands 
and in towns, and thus helped to cure the immense evil of 
Norse robbery. Sailors took wonderfully to farming. He mar- 
ried a French princess, was baptized, wore the white robe for 
seven days, and thought himself a Christian. He distributed 
good lands to churches and convents as a compensation for his 
bad deeds while forty years a Viking. Thus Normandy was 
born among the nations. He became a wise ruler, enterpris- 
ing, liberal, a kindly old sea-farer, with such morality as he 
thought expedient. His people laid aside their barbarism, and 



244 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

became French in their language, their culture, their civilization. 
At length, in 1027, William was born, "the most terrible, as 
he was the last outcome of the Norman race." As the hunter 
of beasts and of men, the builder of cities and the creator of an 
English epoch, he was the Nimrod of his time. The man who 
"loved the wild deer as though he had been their father," was 
never loved by the people as his national children. In him 
cold human will appears tremendous. His crimes can not be 
denied, his virtues may too often be repressed — such as his 
honesty, his hatred of chicanery and simony, his freedom from 
hypocrisy, his conjugal fidelity, his regard for law — but the 
eminent trait is his power. The Church was greatly affected by 
him; it was favored in Normandy, it was revolutionized in 
England. At home he sought to reform it, and held synods 
for correcting the faults of the clergy. As a builder, founder, 
and patron he was justly proud of his cathedrals and monaster- 
ies, but of none was he prouder than of the school on the Bee, 
or the Brook; one well named, for it sent a gladdening stream 
upon the mental desert. 

The knight Herlwin had retired from the Avars and revelries 
of the world, and he was building his monastery in the woods 
of ash and elm on the Bee. He was making an oven, one day, 
when he heard a stranger say, "God save you." This man 
was Lanfranc, who had wandered out of his native Lombardy, 
where he had been a lawyer at Pavia. He was now in search 
of a place where he might be a monk, a student, a teacher, if 
not a theologian. Bee was the place for him, and there he 
began to make his fame as a shrewd organizer, wise adminis- 
trator, the reformer of Church discipline, an ecclesiastical lawyer, 
and a forerunner of the schoolmen. He soon raised his school 
into rivalry with those which had survived the breakage of 
Charlemagne's empire. It excelled the new Cluny. It became 
the most famous school in Christendom for its advanced thought 
and its development of theology. The best mental activity of 
the time was there seen in Anselm. 

Lanfranc was so obedient to his prior as the vicar of Christ, 
that he would violate a rule of grammar rather than question 
the ungrammatical prior's authority, but he took more freedom 
with dukes and kings. When he became prior his school was 
visited by Duke William, who came in great pomp and looked 



WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 245 

very wise. Boys might be captivated with his earthly grandeur 
if their own superiority was not evinced. They were examined 
in dialectics — a mode of tough reasoning, or too often the spin- 
ning of thought into invisible threads. The duke was utterly 
incapable of this fine art, and Lanfranc knew it. He asked 
William to ravel a skein of tangled logic, probably for a jest. 
The Norman wrath flamed high at the supposed insult, and 
also at the agreement of the prior with the pope in opposing 
his marriage with Matilda of Flanders, a descendant of King 
Alfred. "Go," said he; " leave the country!" Lanfranc 
started on a wretched nag. When the duke overtook him and 
urged him to move on more rapidly, the self-possessed Lom- 
bard replied: "Give me a better horse and I shall go faster." 
The duke laughed, and from that hour made the monk his 
counselor. 

William's greatest achievement was the Norman Conquest 
of England, for whose throne Dane and Saxon were contend- 
ing. As the result of a fictitious claim and daring scheme, 
William raised an army of adventurers, crossed the Channel, 
landed at Hastings in 1066, near there fought the battle of 
Senlac in October, saw King Harold slain, put aside the Ethel- 
ings, and on Christmas was in London, with the crown on his 
head and all England at his feet. So the Norse had come 
again, and the people felt that he was Conqueror. ' ' From 
that day," wrote a monk of Peterborough, "every evil has 
fallen upon our house. May God have mercy upon it!" The 
fact that Pope Alexander II had sanctioned the invasion, and 
sent William the banner of the Church, was poor comfort to 
the monk. By a large view, we may see that England was led 
into a new development and a broader civilization. But in the 
fresh conflict of races there were evils almost intolerable. The 
English people, from baron to peasant, from bishop to monk, 
were oppressed, and on the side of the oppressors there was 
power. During nine years of war and famine men had to en- 
dure the loss of property, exile, poverty, servitude ; the women 
worse. The Normans became the masters in provinces, cities, 
castles, abbeys, and churches. 

The monk, William of Malmesbury,* writing after the Con- 

*Not the first, nor last, of the many English chroniclers from Gildas (550) 
to Ingulfs continuator (i486), but, as Freeman says, "the first historian who 



246 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

quest had struck his fathers, says, "This was a fatal day to 
England, a melancholy havoc of our dear country, through its 
change of masters." But he thinks the Church needed to be 
roused by chastisement. He draws a strong contrast: "The 
desire after literature and religion had decayed for several years 
before the arrival of the Normans [from Normandy]. The 
clergy, contented with a very slight degree of learning, could 
scarcely stammer out the words of the sacraments ; and a per- 
son who understood grammar was an object of wonder. The 
monks mocked the rule of their order by fine vestments, and 
the use of every kind of food. The nobles, given up to luxury 
and wantonness, went not to church in the morning according 
to the manner of Christians, but merely, in a careless way, 
heard matins and masses from a hurrying priest in their houses. 
The common people, left unprotected, were a prey to the most 
powerful, who amassed fortunes by either seizing their property 
or by selling their persons into foreign lands. Lust reigned. 
Drinking in parties was a universal practice ; entire nights and 
days were spent in it. The vices attendant on drunkenness, 
which enervate the human mind, followed ; hence, when they 
engaged William, with more rashness and blind fury than mil- 
itary skill, they doomed themselves and their country to slavery 
by one easy victory. ... I would not ascribe all these 
bad propensities universally to the English. I know that many 
of the clergy, at that day, trod the path of sanctity; and 
many of the laity, of all ranks and conditions, were well- 
pleasing to God. But the good must sometimes go with the 
bad into captivity." 

Then comes the vivid picture of the Normans — proudly 
appareled, more temperate in food, hardly able to live without 
war, fierce in battle, and, where strength fails of success, ready 
to use strategy and bribes. "They live in large houses with 
economy ; envy their equals ; wish to excel their superiors ; 



critically balances facts." This William was an ardent lover of literature, an 
eager book-hunter on his travels, the librarian of his Malmesbury Convent, of 
which he refused to be abbot, and the abridger of Paschasius Radbert's Com- 
mentary on the Lamentations of Jeremiah, into which he dropped tears of his 
own, to show that Hebrew prophet and Saxon monk had common sorrows in 
captivity. He ended his Chronicle with the year 1142, still eager for "pure 
historical truth," though not able to sift out all legends; and soon after he died, 
in hope of meeting St. Patrick, Aldhelm, and Dunstan, whose lives he had written. 



CHURCH POLICY. 247 

plunder their subjects, though they defend them from others ; 
faithful to their lords, though a slight offense renders them 
perfidious. They weigh treachery by its chance of success, 
and change their sentiments with money. Yet they are the 
kindest of nations, and highly honor strangers. They also in- 
termarry with their vassals. They revived, by their arrival, the 
observances of religion, which were every-where grown lifeless 
in England. You might see churches rise in every village, 
and monasteries in towns and cities, built after a style unknown 
before [Norman architecture] ; you might behold the country 
flourishing with renovated rites ; each wealthy man counted a 
day lost if he did not signalize it by some grand deed." The 
English Church was Normanized for a time. Foreigners, even 
Italians, were preferred for office. "The war of races" went 
on so long as it was hopeless for an Englishman to aspire to 
any high office in his native land or Church. 

William placed the English Church under the rule of the 
pope. Never had papal jurisdiction been so fully admitted in 
Britain. Two cardinals came and presided at a synod, whigh 
deposed Archbishop Stigand, nominally for his lack of proper 
consecration, or for his disregard of strict Romanism, but really 
for his patriotic spirit as an Englishman. But William was care- 
ful to have the office filled by Lanfranc, in 1070, and to resist 
the absolute power claimed by Rome. No pope, not even 
Hildebrand, was allowed to send letters and legates into his 
realm without his permission. He said to the pope: "I pay 
Peter-pence to you, not as tribute, but as alms. Homage I do 
not render." No man could be excommunicated, or invested 
with office, or heard at Rome in an appeal, nor any synod be 
held, without the king's license. Lanfranc was the champion 
of transubstantiation, but did not carry so high a hand in ref- 
erence to clerical celibacy and papal supremacy. His aim, 
doubtless, was to be politic in reforming abuses, to employ no 
violent measures of discipline, to provoke no national antipa- 
thies, to sacrifice neither the state to the Church nor the 
Church to the state, to conciliate and to fuse all the people 
into the desired unity. He did much to keep in apparent 
harmony those forces which broke out into fierce war after he 
was gone. The currents of thought which had started at Bee 
at least moistened the English mind. 



248 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

The ever- needed lesson of gracefully submitting to the in- 
evitable had to be learned. The new race of historians showed 
a thorough drilling in it. Those who continued the old Anglo- 
Saxon Chronicle described King William as "mild to good 
men who loved God, but severe beyond measure to those 
who withstood his will." He sought to make an entry of all 
English lands and property in a register — the Domesday Book. 
It shows that the native people had homes, cattle, goods ; that 
charities were not forgotten, and that there was wealth belong- 
ing to the clergy, monasteries, and churches. William abol- 
ished capital punishments. He ended the slave-trade in his 
dominions. But he won no real love, even from the Normans. 
"He was a hard man, austere, exacting, oppressive; his heavy 
hand made the English themselves comprehend their own na- 
tional unity through a community of suffering." His work 
was transitional. At last the conquered triumphed, and the 
English language is a proof of their vitality. 

The Norman Conquest affected the Scottish Church. It 
caused a new migration of Anglo-Saxons into the North. 
Among the fugitives was one princely group, whose reception 
by King Malcolm Canmore (1056-93), makes a turning-point in 
history — Edgar, the legal heir to the English throne, his mother, 
and his sister Margaret, who soon married the king of the 
Scots. This queen, the famous Saint Margaret, was zealous in 
civilizing the people and enlightening the king. She under- 
took to ornament the Culdee Church by imposing upon it the 
Roman ritual, and conforming it more fully to the Roman 
model. To promote her reforms a synod was convened. She 
very skilfully addressed the native clergy, who could understand 
only Gaelic, and the king interpreted her English words. She 
probably then insisted (as she did afterwards) that the oneness 
of the catholic faith required unity in forms of worship; that 
the Scots celebrated mass according to a barbarous ritual ; that 
Lent was wrongly computed, and Easter not yet quite rightly 
observed ; and what was more important, the Lord's Day was 
openly profaned by labor, idleness, or amusements. The clergy 
seem to have pondered these things with some caution. The 
nobles had a lesson in courtly manners. They had a habit of 
rising from her table before grace was said by Chaplain Turgot. 
To cure this she offered to all the chiefs who would remain 



NOTE ON CHAPTER XI. 249 

until thanks were offered, a cup of the best wine. This was a 
persuasive not to be resisted. Every guest became eager to 
win his ' 'grace-cup," and the usage was extended through the 
land. So says Turgot, an Anglo-Saxon, who had once been at 
the court of Olaf the Saint, in Norway, lost wealth in a ship- 
wreck, or some Norse investment, entered Jarrow as a monk, 
engaged in churchly architecture at Durham, held ecclesiastical 
offices there, and become confessor to Queen Margaret and her 
biographer. He wrote thus : ' ' Others may admire the signs of 
sanctity which miracles afford; I much more admire in Marga- 
ret the works of mercy. Such signs are common to the evil 
and the good; but the works of true piety and charity are pe- 
culiar to the good." He did not question the miracles imputed 
to her ; we find her devoutness, liberality, and civilizing influ- 
ence far more credible. In her schemes she was aided by 
Lanfranc of Canterbury. Her royal sons, Alexander and Da- 
vid (1 1 53), quite nearly executed them. Important parishes 
were given to foreign priests; monasteries had foreign abbots. 
France and Italy were exporting their surplus of monks, and 
Scotland received a full supply. Turgot was made Bishop of 
St. Andrew's, and consecrated by a Norman at York. The old 
Culdees did not see any special need of so many foreigners. 
They were restless under the innovations. Turgot was not 
happy. He resigned, and went to die in his old quarters at 
Durham. But Romanism made advances in Scotland. 



NOTE. 

Transubstantiation was not the doctrine of the English Church before 
Lanfranc was its primate. His predecessor, ^Elfric (995-1006, or yElfric, 
Archbishop of York, 1023-50, or both), maintained a doctrine similar to that 
of Ratram, whose book he knew. His friend, Bishop Wulfstan, and others, 
agreed with him, or left no protest./ The popes seem not to have given a 
final statement of their dogma until Innocent III, near his death, held the 
Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which declared that "In virtue of the power 
conferred on the Church by Christ, bread and wine are transubstantiated 
into flesh and blood by means of the formula of consecration pronounced by 
a priest." /Bunsen (God in History, III, 148) shows the absurd conclusion 
thus: "Therefore there can be no salvation outside of the Church, for she 
alone makes that [body] whereby the sacrament saves us." Still many 
Parisian divines argued for a real presence of Christ's body in the sacrament 
without any change in the bread and wine, or a consubstantiation. 



250 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



Chapter XII. 

REFORMS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

There was an expectation that the year iooo would be the 
dawn of the millennium. It prompted some men to think of 
reformatory measures; others indulged in wild excitement, de- 
spairing listlessness, or reckless abuse of time and property. 
It gave an impetus to pilgrimages. It was followed by a seri- 
ous question, Was not the Church too warlike? Was she an 
advocate between the people and God? The good thought 
went out from Cluny. Synods and rulers acted together in re- 
pressing feudal wars, and one result was that "The Peace of 
God" was proclaimed through France, about 103 1, and was 
hailed by nearly all classes with enthusiasm. Churches must 
be safe shelters only to men of peace, and not to bands 
of robbers. Let the sword rust and the plowshare grow 
bright. But the Church was not able to enforce the rule. 
Harvests and health came back to the land, and warriors were 
again in their savage work. If kings fought, vassals might 
quarrel. The plan of a general peace was modified, and the 
"Truce of God " was adopted (1041) as more practical. It pro- 
vided that all fighting, public and private, should be suspended 
from Wednesday evening of each week to the following Mon- 
day morning, thus covering the time which was hallowed by 
our Lord's passion and resurrection. In this merciful scheme 
were also included the entire seasons of Advent and Lent, and 
the great festivals. Offenders against the Truce were subject to 
heavy punishments, even death. It was never fully enforced, 
yet never abolished. It was "the most glorious enterprise 
of the clergy," says Sismondi. "It conduced most to soften 
manners, develop sentiments of compassion, without injury to 
the spirit of courage." The curious fact is that some men 
went to war for the sake of enforcing the Truce. It gave en- 



PAPAL MORALS. 25 I 

couragement, if not an impetus, to the building of monasteries 
and churches. Architecture, whose history had always involved 
that of religion, entered upon its golden period of Germanic 
development, and probably guilds of monks slowly reared those 
Gothic cathedrals which stand without a record of their mys- 
terious origin. 

"The Reformation of the eleventh century," as it has been 
called, was an attempt to remove certain evils by means of 
synods and an increasing papal power. Corruptions had long 
been accumulating. Agobard, of Lyons, who died in 840, had 
written of priests who were servants of nobles and high clergy- 
men: "These chaplains are constantly to be found serving the 
tables, mixing wine, leading out the dogs, managing the ladies' 
horses, or looking after the lands." Various councils, in the 
ninth century, took measures to extirpate simony, "this heresy 
so detestable, this pest so hateful to God;" and still bishops 
bought and sold civil and ecclesiastical offices. Archbishops 
became powerful by this sort of brokerage. Nearly every body 
from the monk to the emperor, from the curate to the pope, 
engaged in the traffic. 

Worse still, writers of their age charged many of the popes 
with the blackest crimes. If the guilty popes had not asserted 
that each of them was the vicar of Christ and a holy father to 
the entire Church, we might apply to them the rule that a 
system is not justly responsible for all the defects of its adher- 
ents ; that a good office may be held by bad men. But, 
according to the papal system, the holy pontiff was not a mere 
adherent or professor or advocate or fellow-officer with equals ; 
he was the one supreme administrator of God's visible king- 
dom ; he was the chief visible mediator between God and men ; 
he was, in his time, the only one of his rank ; the solitary 
representative of Christ on earth. His official acts and his 
personal deeds were interwoven. At least ordinary morality 
was justly to be expected. If he had been simply an emperor 
we might pass by his private iniquities. It has been said of 
the papacy that "though its history may be imposing, its 
biography is infamous." A few samples of the infamy — and 
these not the vilest — must be frequently exhibited to that public 
court before which all systems are on trial. In the ninth 
century there were conspiracies, mutilations, murders, in the 



252 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

papal palace, and one pope was accused of murdering two 
ecclesiastics. 

In the tenth century the vices there were too gross for even 
the darkest age — Romanists concede them. Baronius their 
chief annalist, says: "Then was Christ in a very deep sleep, 
when the ship was covered with waves ; and what seemed 
worse, when the Lord was thus asleep, there were wanting dis- 
ciples, who, by their cries, might awaken him, being themselves 
all fast asleep." The Church then sunk to its very lowest de- 
pression. The nations of Europe were never in greater danger 
of reducing Christianity to the level of Mohammedanism. The 
miseries of their time kept men from study, thought, and 
elevating work. The disorder and ignorance were increased by 
the fact that few of the popes had either culture or morality. 
Their outrages were scarcely viler than those of a Turk in his 
capital and harem. 

Crime was so common in the Lateran palace that Rome 
expected it of the usurper Sergius III (905-1 1), who led an 
abominable life with the prostitutes Theodora and her two 
daughters. They, their paramours, and their vile-born sons 
controlled the papacy for nearly sixty years. * Theodora kept 
John X fourteen years in the papal chair, and he seems to have 
been warlike enough to prevent the Saracens from capturing 
Rome; but, in 928, her daughter Marozia caused his death, 
and advanced her own son, John XI, to the holy office. When 
he was imprisoned by a brother (for this pontifical family was 
without natural affection), her grandson was elected, in 956, the 
twelfth papal John. This youth so filled his palace with court- 
esans that decent women were terrified from pilgrimages to 
Rome. Christendom was shocked by reports of his lawless- 
ness, and the German clergy would yet bring him to trial. 

Germany now comes to the front. Her empire, named from 
the secular stand-point the German, and from the papal, the 
Holy Roman Empire, is for centuries the backbone of political 
history in Europe. It had been formed by separation from 
France, by union with Italy, and by the enterprise of its 
founder, Henry the Fowler (919-36), the first great Saxon, 

* Baronius admits that many popes were badly controlled by wicked 
women, but the story of a Pope Joan, about 880, is now generally regarded as 
fabulous. 



OTHO I, THE GREAT— THE FIRST GERMAN POPE. 253 

and his successors. The strife about investitures was larger 
than the questions, whether the popes should crown the emper- 
ors, and the emperors should nominate, install, and control the 
German bishops ; for it brought forward the claims of the pope 
to rule both Church and state in Germany, and of the emperor 
to manage both papacy and kingdom in Italy. Should the 
empire be chiefly German, or Roman ? This question was 
fought out in long wars. 

Otho I, the Great (936-73), imitator of Charlemagne, wise, 
just, independent, as genuinely Saxon as his father, is worthy 
to be enrolled among the great civilizers. This mightiest mon- 
arch then in Europe had no fixed home. His queen, Edith, 
sister of King Athelstan, of England, went often with him 
wherever he went to conquer provinces, sit as a judge of diffi- 
cult cases, attend festivals, and witness ordeals by fire, the cross, 
and the duel. He chased back the Northmen and sent mis- 
sionaries among them. He and his clergy, says Carlyle, were 
' ' always longing much for the conversion of the Wends and 
Huns; which indeed was, as the like still is, the one thing 
needful to rugged heathens of that kind." He unified and 
nationalized the Church in the Germanic part of the empire, 
and at Rome sought to repress papal crimes and the republican 
spirit. But there was little reform in the old city until it was 
visited by young Otho III (983-1002), who gave to it his 
young cousin Bruno, or Gregory V (996-9), the first German 
pope : an upright man, scholarly, generous to the poor, but 
greatly troubled by anti-popes, and soon removed by a mys- 
terious death. The expected millennium did not bring Rome 
to penitence. 

To understand ''Otho, Wonder of the World," we must 
know Gerbert, whose science and biting criticisms were signs 
of daybreak. This notable man was born in Auvergne, reared 
there in a monastery, and in other French schools, and sent by 
his abbot into Spain. He learned to speak Arabic with the 
fluency of a Saracen. Among Arab, or perhaps Christian, teach- 
ers at Cordova he was started on his path of physical science. 
Called to be a professor at Rheims, he flung new light upon 
the old studies of the trivium and quadrivium. He introduced 
the decimal notation and Arabic numerals ; explained the earth 
with a globe, and looked through tubes at - the stars; invented 



254 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

clocks, and, perhaps, had an organ played by steam; inter- 
preted Virgil, and wrote books on rhetoric and logic ; and for 
his genius and versatility got the very adhesive name of a ma- 
gician in days when witchcraft was regarded as satanic. 

Gerbert took the side of Hugh Capet, the organizer of the 
new nationality which turned Gaul into France. As lay abbot 
of St. Martin of Tours he ranked with churchmen ; as a son of 
the Count of Paris, and owner of the largest central fief, he was 
the chosen leader of the barons. They helped him thrust aside 
the Carlovingian line of kings, and crowned him in 987, and he 
reigned nine years. He fortified his throne by liberal devotion 
to the Church, whose freedom he stoutly maintained, admitting 
no supreme mastery at Rome. His son and heir, Robert the 
Pious, was the studious pupil of Gerbert, and was yet to be 
tested by a papal decree. 

Twice at Rome, Gerbert inspected affairs with eyes like 
those of Luther, five hundred years later, and wrote, similarly, 
to a friend : ' ' All Italy appears to me a Rome, and the morals 
of the Romans are the horror of the world." He would not 
remain there as abbot of Bobbio. If he wrote a certain speech, 
he startled one synod by his bold words, when Arnulf, the 
Archbishop of Rheims, was tried, in 991, by a synod, for trea- 
son against Hugh Capet. The papal party defended Arnulf, 
and wished to have the pope decide the case. Opposed to him 
was the Bishop of Orleans, who said, in a speech that Gerbert 
is said to have written : "It is notorious that there is not 
one at Rome who knows enough of letters to be a door- 
keeper." As to the recent popes, "are all the priests of God — 
men of learning and holy lives — to submit to such monsters, 
full of all infamy, void of all knowledge, human and divine? 
Is not a pontiff, who refuses to hear the voice of counsel, the 
Man of Sin, Antichrist, the Mystery of Iniquity? Better seek 
a decision from the pious bishops of Gaul and Germany, than 
from the venal and polluted court of Rome." This advice was 
courageously taken. Arnulf was certain to be condemned by 
the synod: so he abdicated, and resigned his spiritual authority 
to the bishops, his temporalities to the king; but was impris- 
oned as a criminal. 

Gerbert was now appointed Archbishop of Rheims. He 
was soon in trouble because the synod had written to Pope 



GERBERT— ROBERT THE PIOUS. 255 

John XV* apologizing for having acted without his authority; 
they had waited for his advice, but it had not come. He now 
sent it and summoned every man of them to Rome for a new 
trial of the case; ordered them to reinstate Arnulf; and sus- 
pended them meanwhile from their episcopal offices. Would 
these bishops maintain the Gallican liberties ? At first they 
stood firm, and there was danger of a schism between the 
French and Roman Churches. Hugh Capet wanted a free, 
national Church in France. But his mind was filled with sus- 
picions, by cunning agents of the pope, against Gerbert, who 
did not resign his office in 994, when he accepted an invitation 
from Otho to give scientific instruction at his court. Then the 
new council in France decided that Arnulf had a right to the 
see of Rheims, but he was kept in prison until Robert the 
Pious came to the throne (996-1031), and wanted to use him 
in obtaining the sanction of Pope Gregory V to his marriage 
with his cousin Bertha. Robert was more nearly saint than 
statesman ; not like his Saxon ancestor, Robert the Strong, who 
gallantly resisted the Northmen ; but peaceful, generous, fond of 
writing hymns and of choral music, and devoted to the erection 
of churches. All these graces went for nothing, since he was 
not canonically married. Pope Gregory and his council sent 
forth this decree: "King Robert shall renounce Bertha and do 
penance for seven years. If he refuse, let him be anathema, 
and let Bertha be anathema !" The bishops who had sanctioned 
the union were to be suspended until they should appear at 
Rome and give satisfaction. Robert had to yield. He sor- 
rowfully parted with faithful Bertha. His new and beautiful 
wife, as if to put him to penance, ruled him tyrannically, and 
brought up from her native Aquitaine a pack of courtiers who 
made more lax the morals of Paris, f Thus Rome triumphed. 
We might have seen Gerbert in the train of Otho, when the 



*Bad popes had a fondness for this good name. They assumed it probably 
to indicate that they were of the Italian party. 

t Her name was Constantia. She wished him to write a hymn in her 
honor. He wrote that fine one which was adopted in the Church services, "O 
Constantia Martyrum," (the constancy of the martyrs). With pride she saw 
her name in the first line, and inquired no farther. She was applauded for her 
cruelty to the leaders of some remnant of Gnostics, or Manicheans, at Orleans, 
where a synod condemned them (1022). They were the first heretics put to 
death in France after the Priscillianists (385). 



256 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Lateran palace was cleansed. We might look in upon him at 
Ravenna, as archbishop for a year, and quite indulgent to 
the married clergy. In 999 he was elected pope. He took 
the name of Sylvester II. The triumph of Otho now seemed 
complete. He built a new palace on the Aventine, so that em- 
peror and pope might dwell in the same old city. His mistake 
was in living there too grandly, affecting the style of the Eastern 
emperors, whom his Greek mother admired, and trying to con- 
vince the Germans that their rudeness demanded the Roman 
fashions. He dreamed of ruling the Western world by the 
Justinian code. He is to be remembered for his great moral 
influence upon the papacy, the German Church with her mis- 
sions, and the infant literature of his father-land. By reforming 
the papacy the Othos gave it strength, when otherwise it might 
have gone to wreck. 

The new pope, in the whirl of the millennial excitement 
which threw the pious emperor into mental gloom, is not famous 
for any great measures, save that much needed one of simple 
morality.* Since a French council had restored Amulf to 
Rheims, he sent him the pallium ; but as an act of grace for 
presumed penitence. One case may suffice to illustrate the 
extent of papal power then in Germany. A little feminine 
pride brought on a war of bishops. Sophia, a sister of Otho, 
was to enter the nunnery of Gandersheim. The Bishop of 
Hildesheim was not lofty enough to confer the veil upon her: 
so she applied to Willigis, Archbishop of Mayence. He was 
the son of a wheelwright ; had been court-preacher and tutor of 
Otho, and the princess admired his good humor, learning, and 
piety. When jeered by courtiers, who sketched him on public 
walls with his hand at a wheel, he wrote beneath some carica- 
tures a couplet: "Willigis, remember whence thou earnest." 
As archbishop he emblazoned a wheel on his coat of arms. In 
him popes were to find a Teutonic independence. He went 
and veiled the princess ; he even held a synod at Gandersheim. 
Her bishop complained that his diocese was invaded, but his 
feelings were soothed in a kindly way. His successor, Bern- 



*Fulbert, one of Gerbert's pupils, dispensed his learning in the monastic 
school at Chartres. Still more learned was Burchard, Bishop of Worms, 1006, 
who devoted many years to the compilation of a work on theology, ethics, and 
discipline. 



WILLIGIS— BERNWARD— HENRY THE SAINT. 257 

ward found himself barred out of Gandersheim by the high-born 
nuns, and Willigis there again to dedicate a church, and to 
hold another provincial synod. The pivotal question now was 
whether Bernward rightfully had any diocesan rule over the 
community of insolent nuns. It went up to the pope. He 
and his synod decided that Bernward should have rule, for the 
present, over the convent, church, village, and lands of Gander- 
sheim ; but that the final decision should be rendered by a 
synod in Germany under the presidency of a papal legate. This 
synod met in 1001, in a Saxon town, and, as it was likely to 
go against him, Willigis broke it up in a stormful way, and left 
as master of the field. The main result was that the German 
bishops refused to appear in Rome in supple obedience to pope 
and emperor. Gerbert was foiled, but he was politic. It was 
soon necessary to elect Otho's successor, and he wanted the 
powerful influence of Willigis in favor of Henry the Saint 
(1002-24) whom he crowned the year before his own death. 
Not a pope, but the emperor calmed the storm, whose first 
cloud had been seen in the veil of his aunt, Sophia. She was 
now prioress of the troublesome convent; she made peace with 
all parties, and Bernward was happy as her recognized bishop. 
The emperor was a just and Christian ruler, very active in 
reforming the clergy and rebuilding churches which the Slavonic 
invaders had destroyed. He lived as a monk with his wife, 
the Empress Kunigunda, the nun of the palace, who answered 
a vile slander by resorting to the ordeal, and walking unharmed 
(it is said ) on plates of glowing hot iron. Being childless, they 
lavished their affections on the German Church in the current 
spirit of piety. 

The next German king and emperor, Conrad II (1024-39), 
was less rigorous towards the popes, and their vices were again 
flagrant. One party set up a boy of twelve years, Benedict 
IX, who brought in the former infamies, resolved to wed his 
cousin, and sold his office to John Gratian, or Gregory VI, 
who was aided by the earnest Hildebrand, in attempting some 
degree of order as the pope of the people. Already another 
faction of the nobles had their pope. A third came when 
Benedict failed in love, and resumed the tiara, as the pope of 
the vicious. A writer of the time calls them ''three devils," 
each holding one of the large churches in Rome. This scandal 

17 



258 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

roused the emperor, Henry III (1039-56), who was severe, 
despotic, and more zealous for the Truce of God among the 
nations, than for papal claims. Encouraged by the general 
voice of the clergy, he went into Italy and held the council of 
Sutri (1046), which set aside the three rivals. A zealous re- 
former was elected, but soon died ; another had a shorter life. 
The emperor nominated his popular cousin, Bruno, Bishop of 
Toul, well reputed for learning, prudence, piety, chanty, love 
of music, and eloquence in the pulpit. To prove his unfitness 
he openly confessed his sins. But a large assembly at Worms 
invested him with the ensigns of the papacy. As Pope Leo 
IX he was on his way to Rome when a monk met him (it is 
said) at Besancon, and raised the question whether he was 
properly consecrated? Could an emperor and his German 
lords make a pope? The monk was Hildebrand. The force 
and result of his inquiry will be seen when his work and ideas 
are understood. 

Two Italians were aiming at reforms. One was Peter 
Damian, born at Ravenna, 1007, left by a poor mother to 
perish, and saved by the wife of a parish priest — a fact which 
ought to have checked his zeal against the married clergy. 
Early an orphan, he was the wretched swineherd of a cruel 
brother. Rescued by a kindlier brother, he was sent to 
school. He became famous and rich as a teacher, and then 
severe as the Bishop of Ostia, cardinal, and the pope's trav- 
eling agent. This Dunstan of Italy was honest without dis- 
cretion, energetic, eloquent, credulous, superstitious, and intol- 
erant. With a rare zest he wrote the life of a hermit named 
Dominic, the hero of self-torture, flagellation, and penance ; 
who beat himself black for the sins of his life and of other 
men, at the rate of a hundred lashes for every psalm. Peter 
found his wit and buffoonery the hardest to whip out of his 
own nature. He was extravagant in his praises of ' ' the Blessed 
Virgin." The Ave Maiia became a part of the Church devo- 
tions. His force was strongly directed to uphold celibacy and 
put down simony. Celibacy was not yet the rule of all the 
clergy, especially in the districts of Milan ; nor was purity of 
clerical life elsewhere the general practice. In his exposures 
of clerical sins he made his book as gross as that of the later 
Peter Dens. He advertised the vices which he aimed to repress, 



HILDEBRAND. 



259 



and threw dishonor on those priests who were wedded as law- 
fully as the human laws would permit, and who asked God to 
solemnize marriages for which there was scarcely provision in 
the civil and ecclesiastical codes. 

Archbishop Heribert of Milan (1045) was married. In his 
diocese unmarried clergymen were regarded with suspicion, and 
this was general in Lombardy. The Milanese clergy had more 
learning than was usual in that century ; their discipline was 
strict ; their attention to pastoral duties earnest. The proverb 
was, "Milan for clerks (clergy), Pavia for pleasures, Rome for 
buildings, Ravenna for churches." Peter Damian admitted that 
he had never seen a body of clergy equal to the Milanese, and 
he also praised those of Turin, whose marriage was sanctioned 
by the Bishop Cunibert* 

A more prudent reformer was Hildebrand, the son of arT 
Etruscan carpenter, born about 1015, and early impressed with 
the vices around him. Disgusted with the laxity of the Italian 
monks, he crossed the Alps and entered Cluny, the center of a 
moral reformation. He studied there with the later Pope Gregory 
VI, became his chaplain, loved him despite his purchase of the 
sacred chair, and tried to strengthen him in arresting the tide 
of wickedness in Rome. He heard him confess at Sutri that 
"the odious taint of simoniacal heresy" was on him, saw him 
abdicate, and went with him in the emperor's train to Ger- 
many. With these lessons he began his great career. His 
name has been given to an epoch — the Hildebrandine age — and 
it fills a large place in modern literature, f He is admired for 
his genius, real greatness, severe morals, quick perception of 
the place he might take and the demands which he could meet, 
self-possession, singleness of aim, intensity of purpose, and ab- 
sorbing devotion to one object, whether that object was refor- 
mation or papacy. Admit him both ; if the papacy must exist 
he was the man to reform it, and to be held responsible for 
unduly exalting it. He saw the Church under the heavy hand 
of the secular powers; did he see that it might be independent 

* In the opposition to them Ariald and Laudulf became noisy leaders, who 
roused the people against them, and whose followers were called Paterini. This 
name came to be applied to all opponents of the priesthood, and to mean dis- 
senters of all classes. 

tOn him are new lectures, essays, volumes; one German Life, seven volumes 
octavo, with eight thousand pages. 



260 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of them, on some modern Protestant basis, and not absolutely 
their ruler? Protestant eyes were not yet given to men. He 
aimed to release the papacy from imperial dictation, spiritualize 
it, and lift it abo^e all earthly thrones. 

"Brother Bruno, I can not go with you to Rome," he is 
reported as saying at Besancon.* "Why not?" asked the 
robed pontiff. ' ' Because you have not been canonically elected 
and consecrated ; you are going, by a secular appointment, to 
lay hands on the see of St. Peter." The gentle Bruno saw the 
vast difference. He laid aside his papal vestments and titles. 
As a pilgrim, he went with Hildebrand through Italy; entered 
Rome barefoot ; wept at the tomb of Peter ; and at the church 
where clergy and people waited to shout for him, whom they 
had seen before on pilgrimages, he told them how he had been 
chosen by the emperor, begged them to make known their will 
canonically ; and heard their will in loud acclamations. Now 
he felt sure that he was Pope Leo the Ninth. And Hildebrand 
was papal director. 

Impatient to repress simony, Leo's first heavy stroke fell 
upon France. He promised to assist in the consecration of 
the splendid Abbey church of St. Remi, at Rheims. But he 
frightened the bishops by sending them a summons to meet him 
there in a council (1049). Many of them dreaded an inquiry 
into their practices. They begged their king, Henry I, to in- 
terfere. He tried to have the pope defer his visit, as there was 
some war on hand. But Leo was not to be diverted from his 
purpose. He came. The assemblage was immense. The 
whole realm had its best men there to do honor to the saint 
who had baptized Clovis. On the eve of the ceremonies the 
vast crowd pressed at the doors of the church, and hundreds 
passed the night there in the open air. The streets were brill- 
iantly .lighted with tapers. The next day the body of the saint 
was borne into the church. Many wept, some swooned away; 
in the rush others were trodden down and killed. The building 
was consecrated. 

At the council there were about twenty bishops (some be- 
ing away gladly with the royal army) and fifty abbots ; some 
of these were from England. "We are met," said Leo, "for 
the reformation of disorders in the Church, and the correction 



* Or at Worms, if he was there at the election of Bruno. 



ROBERT GUISCARD. 26 1 

of morals. The bishops and abbots will come forward and 
swear their innocence, if they have not been guilty of simony." 
Three came at once ; others wanted time, and had private con- 
ferences with the pope. All the bishops but four took the 
oath. Several abbots confessed their guilt. Grosser sins were 
proved on some bishops. When they were severely punished, 
the great question came, "Whether they acknowledged any 
other primate than the Roman pontiff?" Not a voice of dis- 
sent was heard. Thus the pope was master at Rheims. 

And so elsewhere. Leo had a system of visitations for 
reforming vices, and for Romanizing Europe. He and his 
legate, Hildebrand, entered kingdoms without regard to the w T ill 
of kings. Their anathemas broke down the loyalty of prelates 
to national crowns, and forced it to the Roman miter. They 
won favor by appearing as reformers and deliverers, paternally 
redressing grievances under which men had long groaned. The 
good welcomed them ; the bad needed their discipline. They 
made a show of holding synods, or councils, for trying simoniacs 
and such thinkers as poor Berengar; but these old and legiti- 
mate tribunals were turned into courts of inquisition, with judges 
imported from Rome. If a bishop protested, he was as liable 
to severe punishment as was he who confessed his crimes.* 
There was no innocence in king or noble, prelate or monk, 
who did not come as a meek ox under the yoke. The one 
lesson for the nations to learn was obedience to the papacy. 

The day was coming when popes would need troops to fight 
less spiritual battles. In a strange way Leo converted invaders 
into vassals. He knew that the Normans were a mastering race, 
and that Robert Guiscard (Wiseacre, 1040-1085) had brought 
his fortune-hunters from Normandy into Southern Italy with a 
deeper purpose than fighting off Saracens and Greeks. Robert 
was uniting the Norman colonies already there, and founding a 
kingdom. Maimed fugitives came into Rome with frightful 
reports of families slain, priests routed, churches burnt, monas- 
teries sacked, blazing towns, and wretched people hiding and 
starving among the hills. None of Leo's reputed miracles 
could now save his palace and city. His human trust was 



*Leo IX and Hildebrand deserve some credit for not making clerical crimes 
easy by letting off the offenders with penances and indulgences, as the popes 
did in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. See Note II. 



262 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

mainly in some German regiments. When Cardinal Damian 
saw him leading an army against Robert, with fighting bishops 
in the ranks, and Hildebrand probably near the front, he indig- 
nantly asked, "Would St. Gregory have gone to battle with 
the Lombards, or St. Ambrose against the Arians?" But Leo 
pushed on, and was woefully beaten. He was taken prisoner at 
Civitella (1053), and held there for a year. While pining 
there, near death, his failure proved better than a victory for 
the papacy. The victors learned reverence, perhaps through 
Hildebrand ; they cast themselves at the pope's feet, wept, put 
dust on their heads, and obtained his pardon. A treaty was 
made. By feudal tenure the Normans were granted lands 
enough for a strong kingdom in Southern Italy and Sicily. 
Thus they became the right arm of defense to the papacy 
through long and weary wars. 

Hildebrand was now pope maker and manager for nineteen 
years. He controlled the election of four successive pontiffs, 
and shrewdly retired one whom the chafing Italians elected by 
night. The emperor could not outwit him; nor Roman nobles 
block his way, for Robert Guiscard was at hand to repress 
them ; nor could the Milanese clergy rush into schism, for 
Cardinal Damian was sent to quiet them. He might al- 
ready have been pope, for he was a popular bishop, cardinal, 
and papal chancellor; but he chose to wait until Europe was 
well prepared for his supremacy. It was nearly all papalized. 
He hoped that William the Conqueror would be Rome's new 
Caesar, and he said, "My conscience does not trouble me with 
the bloodshed of the Conquest ; for the higher William mounts 
the more useful he will be to the Church. v But he dreaded the 
willful conqueror. He and Damian invented the scheme by 
which popes were to be elected by a college of cardinals.* A 
stiff breeze came from Germany in March, 1073 ; for Henry IV 
was dealing severely with certain bishops, and threatening ruin 
to any one who should carry an appeal to Rome. The chief 



*The office of cardinal, ox principal, was a growth; but one of Damian's 
reforms was the organization of seven bishops, living near Rome, in a college 
of cardinals, he being one of them. They took .the chief part in the election 
of popes, who appointed the cardinals. When the members of the college were 
so increased as to represent various countries, they became the sole electors 
of the popes. 



EMPEROR HENRY IV. 263 

prelates of Germany were at the doors of Pope Alexander, who 
died the next April. Hildebrand's time was come. 

During- the funeral rites of Alexander there was a loud de- 
mand for the election of his chancellor. The cardinals had a 
brief meeting, and then presented Hildebrand to the cheering 
multitude as the worthy successor of that married apostle whose 
name had been misapplied to a system of despotism over the 
affections, faith, and national loyalty of all people. He took the 
name of Gregory VII, and for nearly thirteen years (1073-85) 
he lived to establish his principles on the basis of the forged 
decretals. He claimed for the papal see the sole right of con- 
voking, presiding over, and dissolving councils ; of annulling the 
decisions of any and every tribunal, of deposing both bishops 
and princes, and of absolving subjects from their oaths of fidel- 
ity. The whole world was his diocese; and he maintained the 
supremacy of the Church over all temporal sovereignties. The 
pope must be pontifex orbis (not urbis alone), the vicar of Christ, 
the viceroy of Almighty God ! Would the world submit to this 
assumption? The question was taken as a kindly invitation by 
most of the churchmen in Western Europe, and they were long 
subservient. But it was a challenge to all national rulers who 
asserted their own right of investiture, and the freedom of 
kings, courts, and synods within their own dominions. 

Germany sent into the field the eminent champion against 
these high pretensions.* He was Henry IV (1056-1106), who 
was crowned at the age of six, and reigned fifty years without 

* There were other resistants. Philip I, King of France (1060-1108), was 
censured by Hildebrand, but he took little pains to fulfill his promises of reform. 
The pope then sought to destroy his people's confidence in him by writing to 
French bishops, charging him with tyranny, simony, perjury, lust, robbery, and 
outrages unheard of among pagans, much of which was too true. The anti- 
papal party was not greatly troubled, for Gregory directed his main force against 
Henry IV, hoping that a humiliated emperor would be a warning to all lesser 
monarchs. Solomon, King of Hungary, would not admit that his territories 
were the property of the Holy Roman Church, nor that he sinned in taking 
investiture from the king of Germany. "Your reign will not be long," said 
Gregory, and it was not. His successor Ladislaus, more prudently bowed to 
Rome. Gregory was careful to strike hardest where his blows might win. By 
flattery here and curses there, by dissimulation and compromise, by granting 
charters or crowns, as to William the Conqueror, to the king of Russia, and to 
a duke of Dalmatia; by stirring up the rebellious (if they were hopefully strong), 
and by nurturing revolts against national rulers, he gained a large measure of 
his over-lauded success. 



264 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

much truce of any sort towards earthly or spiritual powers. 
Another enormous will was let loose in the world, and it went 
on into Barbarossa and Frederick II. The Teutonic spirit of 
revolt against Hildebrandine Rome was tremendous for hundreds 
of years, and is not yet laid. In terrible ways it contributed 
to human liberty, Protestantism being one modern result. 

Young Henry needed moral restraint. His vices were not 
excusable by any law of liberty, nor his tyrannies by any upris- 
ing of the oppressed Saxons. When he wanted money he sold 
bishops' chairs as if they were simply elegant furniture. He 
did not wisely heed the first and gentler counsels of Hildebrand. 
He grew insolent and was reported to be steeping himself in 
dissipation, neglecting public affairs, even playing dice all day 
and sending lies into his antechamber, where stood the worthy 
delegates of the Saxon convention at Goslar, with petitions for 
their old liberties. The pope rejoiced with him in his victory 
over the Saxons "for the peace of the Church," still begged 
him to mend his ways, saw no improvement, and then began 
vigorously to mend them for him. He had put the salesmen 
and buyers of Church offices under ban for simony, and for- 
warded his severe decrees against all manner of lay investiture. 
In his view all lay patronage of benefices was simony, for, after 
a layman or any body else has given his property to God and 
the Church, he has no right to control it. Therefore his law 
cut far and deep. Henry had not corrected any abuses. He 
was now visited by papal legates, and told that if he did not 
reform, quit his simony, and be respectful, he must appear at 
Rome at the next Lent synod, 1076, and answer for his mis- 
deeds. He was wrathful ; he sent an insolent letter addressed : 
"To Hildebrand, now not apostolic pontiff, but false monk," 
and demanded that he should leave his chair. Unfortunately 
for him the guiltiest bishops were his advisers. Even better 
churchmen met with them at Worms, charged the pope with 
simony, magic, and worse, but proved nothing so monstrous. 
They declared the absent pope deposed. 

Henry did not go to Rome. There Hildebrand read his 
contemptuous letters to the Lent synod. With the vote of the 
bishops he then deposed the emperor from both Church and 
empire, released all Christians from allegiance to him, and dealt 
in like manner with the prelates of the council at Worms. 



COUNTESS MATILDA. 265 

Which of these two champions could enforce his act of 
deposition upon the other? All Europe looked on to see 
whether emperor or pope was the stronger man. If the one 
had not lost the confidence of the German people, the other 
might have found another Otho, leading his Saxons to the gates 
of Rome, casting down a pontiff, and electing whom he chose. 
But Henry must be a victim to papal supremacy before the 
Germans would rally to his standards. With a sense of national 
justice, and a love of father-land, rather than a loyalty to the 
papacy, they were ready to abandon him and elect a new 
emperor. This revolt was Gregory's hope. He was deep in 
the intrigues of rivals for the crown. 

The German Diet of October, 1076, agreed that various 
matters of dispute should be left to the pope, who should be 
invited to the next Diet at Augsburg. Also, that if Henry 
should obtain from the pontiff a restoration to the Church before 
the sunset of February 23, 1077, he should resume the impe- 
rial crown ; if not, then another emperor. Meanwhile he should 
reside at Spires with the title of emperor, with a bishop to care 
for his soul, but without a court, an army, and place of public 
worship. 

Henry dreaded to meet the pope at Augsburg, for the Hil- 
debrandine method of controlling a council and humiliating a 
penitent was excruciating. His request for a more private 
meeting in Italy was refused by the artful pope. His will rose 
again. The very Alps and the foes who watched them should 
not bar his deep intentions. In one of the coldest Winters 
noble Queen Bertha, with her infant Conrad, was drawn over 
the snows of St. Bernard on fresh hides, while he climbed and 
plunged where a chamois hunter would not have risked his life. 
Even his mother-in-law, Adelaide, demanded a gift of lands for 
the right of way across her little duchy, and for her valuable 
company on the route. The clergy and people of Turin and 
Milan gave him a freer welcome, hoping that he would redress 
those celibacal grievances. The Lombards were roused to 
enthusiasm, for they hoped that he was going to depose the 
detested Hildebrand. He was urged to enlist soldiers along 
with the bishops and nobles who joined his march. But the 
lion preferred to go meekly. The Lombards would have plans 
of their own. He halted and took lodgings in the Tuscan vil- 



266 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

lage of Canossa, where his kinswoman, the brilliant Countess 
Matilda, had her favorite castle. 

This Italian Zenobia, now thirty years of age, warrior and 
book collector, patron of the rising art and literature at Flor- 
ence, with four languages on her lips, and yet to be painted by 
Cimabue as half-veiled, reining a fiery steed with one hand and 
carrying a pomegranate flower in the other, was a fascinating 
diplomatist, and a type of the princesses who are reported to 
have been as saintly as nuns, and rich in love to the poor and 
in gifts to the Church. It has been said that, while persuading 
the clergy to put away their wives, she repudiated both her 
husbands. Her devotion to the reforms of Hildebrand, and to 
him, was so intense as to be the idle gossip of censors. She 
had brought him to her fortress in the hope that ' ' the apostolic 
pardon" would be as oil on the waves which frightfully tossed 
the ship of Peter. The deposed German bishops, who had 
arrived, were put into cells, chilled and fasted sufficiently, and 
then absolved on condition of helping the emperor down into 
the required depths of penitence. If the holy father had left 
the blazing fires in the castle and met his "prodigal son" with 
the paternal heart of the first Gregory, his phrases about "the 
grace of absolution" and "the consolation of the apostolic 
mercy" would not have been mere boasts in his defensive letter 
to the Germans. 

Not so was pardon cheaply tossed 
To him who sued for favor lost; 
The price of banishing a frown 
Was the surrender of a crown. 

Every title and badge of royalty must be yielded. Ladies, 
princes, even the abbot of Cluny, urged that it was hardly 
Christian thus "to break the reed so bent by the storm." But 
it was papal ! After the terrors of pontifical grace were toned 
down a little, Henry was admitted, by painful degrees, through 
the outer walls of the castle. At the third gate he stood with- 
out a sign of royalty on him, scantily clad in penitential garb, 
barefoot in the snow, fasting and pleading through the 25th of 
January, 1077, and vainly hoping that every hour would end 
the penance. Night brought some relief in his retirement. 
Thus he came and stood a second day and a third. Almost 
insane and about to rush to the Lombards (who were nearer 



CANOSSA. 267 

than he knew) he heard voices of pity. Gregory himself tells 
us, in his letter to the Germans, how "All those who came to 
intercede for Henry, with prayers and weeping, were astonished 
at our unusual rigor, and exclaimed that we showed forth, not 
the severity of the apostle, but the savage cruelty of the tyrant." 

Matilda, Adelaide, the abbot, and others gave written sure- 
ties for Henry, who had taken shelter in a convent, and on the 
fourth day the tall emperor came weeping before the slightly 
built pope. Even Hildebrand, with those eyes so dreadfully 
piercing, wept for once, if we may gladly believe his apologists. 
The absolution was offered on the conditions that Henry would 
promise to abide by the future judgment of the pope, use no 
signs of imperial authority, and require no allegiance of his 
subjects until a German Diet, at which the pope should preside, 
should find that he had violated no law of the Church; and, if 
he should regain his crown, he must enforce all papal decrees, 
and never take revenge for the present humiliation. No real 
absolution at all! It meant that the pope must reign in Ger- 
many. Yet Henry submitted,* and received the usual stripes 
on his naked shoulders, along with the kneeling bishops. 

This was not the end. Next came the celebration of the 
mass, in which the pope referred to Henry's charge of simony, 
and said: "Here is the Lord's body; if I am innocent, may 
this clear me of all suspicions; if I am guilty, may God strike 
me with sudden death!" Amid the anxious silence of the spec- 
tators he took the sacrament, and survived the holy ordeal; 
they burst into applause. "Now," said he to Henry, "do as 
you have seen me do. The German princes have charged you 



* If Henry had risen in a wrath that flamed till the sun was going down, 
and had carried off the holy father on the fleetest horses of the countess to 
the Lombards, or perished in the attempt, I should respect his violence rather 
than his submission; for his rage would have been more honest than his assumed 
meekness when in the iron grasp of a heartless bigot. And the service to 
humanity might have been more valuable than his later violations- of the prom- 
ises wrung from him. 

Villemain (Hist. Gregory VII) thinks that the pope was not more sincere 
than the king, and that he said to the Saxon envoys who feared that Henry 
would return more powerful and implacable than ever: "Be not uneasy; I will 
send him back more accusable than he was." This admiring historian adds: 
"A profound and terrible saying that we would willingly rase from the life of a 
great man." After the absolution Gregory wrote to the Germans: "The whole 
affair is still in suspense." 



268 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

with heinous crimes. Take this and prove whether you are 
innocent." Henry consulted with his friends, and then said 
that such a test would not satisfy his accusers ; it were wiser to 
wait until the German Diet should decide his case.* 

Meanwhile the lords of Lombardy had crept near to Canossa. 
They and the suspended bishops were now informed that the 
pope had conditionally absolved them and the emperor. They 
raised a loud shout of indignation and defiance. They spurned 
the pardon of Hildebrand. They held in contempt every man 
who accepted it. They denounced Henry. They denied his 
authority. They would crown his infant Conrad. But Henry 
bore calmly the derision which they flung in his face. In a 
week the tide was turning. The pope was now in alarm. Ma- 
tilda took care of him, and finally got him safe into Rome. Soon 
the world was startled and scandalized by her grant of all her 
States to the papacy. This inflamed the Italians in the north. 
For Henry their coffers opened and their swords leaped out 
of their scabbards. All the Lombard and Tuscan cities were 
in his possession. He was soon over the Alps, sweeping on 
victoriously, and fighting down rivals. Wars that shook the 
empire, and synods laboring to save the Church, enter into the 
doleful history of years. Gregory's missives, temporizing, 
double-faced, full of shifts and compromises of his own princi- 
ples, and bearing the prophecy that within a year (1080) 
Henry would be dead, or utterly powerless, are not evidences 
of papal infallibility at that time. Outside of Saxony, they 
were futile among the Germans, who forgave the emperor, 
as one who had been reared by corrupting churchmen, and 
they saw in his courtesy, courage, generosity, endurances, tri- 
umphs, and in the sacredness of imperial rights, a reason for 
loyalty to the kaiser. 

In 1 08 1 he was in Italy, desolating the provinces of Ma- 
tilda, hurling stones at Florence, her capital, marching on to 
Rome, and causing Gregory to remember Canossa. In the 
castle of St. Angelo, supplied with funds by the countess, the 
pope bravely endured a siege of three years. He held his 
synods, talked of the hallowing effect of earthly trials, and 
faithfully sent forth his anathemas upon Henry, who set up the 
anti-pope Guibert, and thus made wilder the anarchy in the 

* On this ordeal see Note III. 



GREGORY'S PRIME ERROR. 269 

Church. The Romans yielded, and Henry was master of the 
city. The nobles, clergy, and people besought Gregory to 
agree with his adversary quickly ; but the most that he is said 
to have offered was this: If Henry would submit, to crown 
him ; if not, to let down from his castle a crown upon him, 
attended with a curse! The anti-pope bestowed the crown 
with a blessing. 

Robert Guiscard and his Normans got into the city and, 
after pillage, lust, butchery, and fire, made Gregory the master 
of Rome. But he was sick of the Romans, and unwilling to 
trust them. He retired to the castle of Salerno, and, after ab- 
solving all on whom his anathemas rested, except Henry and 
Guibert, he died there, saying, "I have loved righteousness 
and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile." 

So the great Gregory thought he had failed because the 
world was too wicked for him and his universal dominion; 
perhaps it was too just, too conscious of human rights, too 
loyal to the omnipotent Author of all liberties. It was sadly 
iniquitous, but over it he had assumed a provoking authority 
which would never sanctify it. Admit that he was usually sin- 
cere, and often kind; that he sometimes rose above the super- 
stitions of his age ; that he reformed gross evils ; that he was 
seconded by very many of the noblest spirits, far and near ; 
that the more learned, truthful, and devout souls were gen- 
erally on his side — save poor Berengar, whom he sacrificed ; 
that his seventies fell chiefly on those who were in. most need 
of discipline ; that he raised the papacy to a higher morality ; 
that it attained greater successes under other popes ; that he 
made it a safeguard against political tyrannies ; that he was a 
great saint of the Church, and a grand hero of the empire ; and 
that he left the impress of his gigantic character upon all the 
later history of Europe ; yet his prime error was in making the 
absolute supremacy of the papacy the hopeful means of liberty 
to the Church, and the saving health of all nations. The 
world was not then, nor has it ever been since, willingly, peace- 
fully, prosperously, under a universal spiritual despotism. When 
Gregory assumed the power of dethroning monarchs, and of re- 
leasing their subjects from civil obedience, the spirituality of 
his power was lost in secularity. He did not remedy secular 
misrule. He virtually abolished civil law, and men became 



270 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

lawless. The Church was degraded. His assumptions of 
national rule proved that he was not the vicar of Christ (Matt, 
xxii, 21), nor a true successor of Peter and Paul* (i Peter ii, 
Rom. xiii) ; he was not what this world needed, nor what the 
apostolic Church required. "We read of Gregory with awe, 
mixed perhaps with admiration, perhaps with aversion ; but in 
no human bosom can his character awaken a feeling of love." 

The papal chair had not secured political unity. It had 
caused the wranglings of the two greatest haters of their day. 
The cross, even with a lowered power, would league together 
men whom they had trained. It is noteworthy that the man 
who struck down Henry's rival, Rudolf, was Godfrey of Bou- 
logne, the noblest crusader ; and that the chief of the three 
successive popes, nominated by the dying Gregory, was Urban 
II, who enlisted the Christian nations of Europe in the Cru- 
sades, the first enterprise that ever united them. 

We have seen how the European nations, which made any 
great history for centuries, were organized, and brought into 
a new civilization by Christianity. We have traced the ad- 
vances of the papacy over them. Thus far their political and 
ecclesiastical history have been almost inseparable. Statesmen 
and churchmen had one common interest and work. Hence- 
forth the Church and state will move upon lines more distinct 
from each other, and the papacy will attain no essentially 
higher position. Therefore, in the coming chapters, political 
thrones and the papal chair will receive less attention, and our 
story will be more nearly limited to the national Churches, and 
to the men, principles, and movements which affected them. 
The papacy was not the only bond of their unity. Its history 
is not more important than that of the dissent which it helped 
greatly to produce, and the liberties which it could not utterly 
destroy. 



NOTES. 

I. Pilgrimages, and opposition to them in Palestine. In the ninth 
century measures were taken by councils to restrain the passion for this sort 
of merit, penance, and curiosity ; for many pilgrims took license in sin or 

* He called himself the Vicar of St. Peter and St. Paul. 



NOTES TO CHAPTER XII. 27 1 

became vagabonds, and bishops were absent for years from their charges. 
But pilgrimage itself was not condemned, nor checked. Such great men 
as King Canute and Robert of Normandy gave it the force of their exam- 
ples. The expectation of the end of the world about the year 1000 caused 
immense numbers of all classes to rush to the Holy Land. The pilgrims 
were not molested, nor Europe roused to indignation, until the following 
events occurred: 1. Hakem, the fierce Sultan of Egypt, and the inventor 
of the religion of the Druses, ravaged Jerusalem and destroyed many holy 
buildings in 1010, and levied a tax on pilgrims. 2. Some assaults were 
made on pilgrims, such as the seven thousand who were led (1064) by Sieg- 
fried, Archbishop of Mayence. 3. The holy sepulcher was closed against 
Christians. 4. In 1076 the barbarous Seljukian Turks took the Holy City, 
and oppressed all Christians there, foreign and resident. These Moham- 
medans held Asia Miaor, and reports of their savage persecutions were 
borne into Europe by returning pilgrims who had been outraged. Three 
popes, Sylvester II, Hildebrand, and Victor II, had proposed a European 
war upon the "infidels," as all Mohammedans were called. Robert Guis- 
card had sailed from Southern Italy with thirty thousand men, in 1081, for 
this purpose ; but merely had checked some Turkish operations at sea. 

II. " An indulgence [indulgentid] is, according to the Roman Catholic 
Church, a remission by the pope of the temporal punishment due to sin, 
which a sinner would otherwise be obliged to undergo, either in this world 
or in purgatory. Originally, it indicated remission, relaxation, or mitigation 
of some censure, penalty, or penance prescribed by the Church. In process 
of time, pilgrimages to certain places began to be substituted for the ap- 
pointed penance. Of ' plenary indulgence ' — i. e., remission of all penalties — 
we have no mention before the Crusades./ Towards the close of the eleventh 
century, plenary indulgences were proclaimed by Urban II, as a recompense 
to those who went in person upon the Crusades. They were afterwards 
granted to those who hired a soldier for that purpose, or sent a sum of 
money, instead of fulfilling the vow they had taken of going on that serv- 
ice themselves. Hence originated the sale of them. / The progress of evil 
is rapid, and it was not long before every sin had its price. The popes 
undertook to dispense with the penalties imposed by the Church, upon the 
grounds that the Savior's sufferings were more than sufficient to atone for 
human iniquity ; that the saints have done more than work out their own 
salvation ; and that the superfluous merit accruing from these sources, 
forming a treasure of the supererogatory merits of Christ and the saints, 
was placed at the disposal of the Church of Rome, from which she could 
appropriate to any of her members so much as might serve as a substitute 
or satisfaction for any punishment deserved." 

III. The sacrament as an ordeal. The use of the bread, or wafer, or 
host, came to be one of the worst superstitions and ordeals. BafHed priests 
brought it forward to produce awe, terror, and submission. It is said that 
when Prince Alfred (grandson of the Great) was charged with an attempt 
to seize his royal brother Athelstan, about 926, he went to Rome to prove 



272 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

his innocence before the pope. As he took the holy wafer on his lips he 
fell, and died two days afterwards. One of the German prelates absolved 
by Gregory VII was the Bishop of Augsburg. He was with the emperor in 
1078, at Ulm, celebrating mass in great pomp, and said, " I shall now take 
the Holy Eucharist, in proof that the cause of my lord Henry is just, and 
that of his rival, Rudolf, unjust." He lived after it. The report of this 
success made a great impression on both parties. Gregory said of it, " I 
know what will yet come of it ; the perjured bishop will not taste the bread 
of this year's harvest." Even St. Bernard employed this ordeal, in 1 135, to 
bring the Count of Poitiers over to Innocent II, saying to him: "We have 
entreated you ; you have despised us. Behold the host, the Virgin's Son ! 
The Lord of the Church, which you persecute, comes to you. Your Judge 
is here ; into his hands your soul may fall." The count fell paralyzed, and 
submitted. This superstitious reverence for the holy wafer yielded the ex- 
tremest absurdities. Stories were told that on the wafer was sometimes 
seen the face of the infant Jesus. A Jewish usurer got possession of the 
host, and was accused of throwing it into a caldron of boiling water. The 
proof was that the infant Jesus was seen swimming on the surface! Crowds 
beset the house of the usurer ; he was burnt, even when he thought that 
the Talmud would stop the flames ; and the Jews of the place (Paris, or 
Toulouse) were sorely persecuted. These were some effects of Transub- 
stantiation. 



Period IV. 



FROM THE HEIGHT OF PAPAL LAW TO THE DEPTH OF 
PAPAL IMMORALITY. 

&. 39. 1085—1500. 

WESTERN EUROPE AWAKENED BY FIVE KINDS OF ENTERPRISE! I. MILITARY, IN 
THE CRUSADES AND THE GERMAN AND FRENCH WARS AGAINST ROME. 2. IN- 
TELLECTUAL, IN THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY, AND IN THE 
REVIVAL OF CLASSICAL AND BIBLICAL LEARNING. 3. REFORMATORY, IN 
PREACHING, TRANSLATING THE BIBLE, EXPOSING THE ERRORS OF THE CHURCH, 
AND PRODUCING RELIGIOUS LITERATURE. 4. INVENTIVE, IN THE ART OF 
PRINTING AND MULTIPLYING BOOKS, IN THE PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS, 
AND IN THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 5. LIBERATIVE, IN THE DECAY OF 
FEUDALISM, THE RISING OF THE SERFS, THE FREEDOM OF ITALIAN CITIES, 
AND THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE. 



Chapter XIII. 

CRUSADERS AND SCHOOLMEN. 

1085-1350. 

The Crusades present two phases : that of religious enthu- 
siasm, and that of military enterprise. The Church enlisted in 
them as the wars of the Cross against the Crescent. The 
Christians of the West sought at first to vindicate their right to 
visit the Holy Sepulcher ; then to recover the Holy Land from 
the Mohammedans, who had held it for more than four centu- 
ries.* Pilgrims had told what they had seen and endured; 
three popes had urged a holy war ; but a hermit's voice actually 



*See Chapter XII, Note I. The real causes of these wars were in the 
conflict between (1) the two religions, and (2) the political systems; also (3) the 
Mohammedan conquests and the fear of their extension in Europe, (4) the 
association of Christ with Jerusalem, (5) the European desire for adventure 
and pilgrimage. 

18 273 



274 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

started the movement which has been called "the first Euro- 
pean event." Never before had the Western nations been 
leagued in one common cause. Peter, a native of Amiens in 
Picardy, a soldier, a married man, then a monk, and a hermit, 
ever restless and eager for some new mode of enthusiasm, be- 
came a pilgrim, and saw the tyranny of the infidel in the Holy 
City. He lost his desire for martyrdom when the patriarch, 
Simeon, told him how his poor brethren were oppressed and 
put to shame. The blood ran like fire through his veins, and 
the voice of the Lord seemed to cry from the sacred ruins, 
"Go, Peter, and tell the tribulations of my people to the 
Church." He made his vow, went to Rome (1094), told Pope 
Urban II his story, and was sent out to test the popular senti- 
ment ; for Urban's word might not be law when the emperor, 
Henry IV, was opposing him in Germany, and King Philip of 
France was threatened with the papal ban. Upon a mule rode 
the little hermit, crucifix in hand, head and feet bare, preaching 
the Crusade. At cross-roads and in cathedrals his rude and 
ready eloquence, his appeals to every passion of valor and pity, 
drew people of every class by thousands. He read letters from 
the Greek patriarch, from the Roman pope, and one (as he 
pretended) which the Lord let fall from heaven. The test was 
satisfactory. 

Urban grew zealous.* His measures secured the Council 
of Placentia, in Italy, early in 1095, where two hundred bishops, 
four thousand clergy, and thirty thousand lay people took oath 
to wage a Crusade. That same year he preached the Crusade 
as eloquently at the Council of Clermont, in France, to still 
larger crowds, who shouted, "Deus vult — God wills it." They 
pressed forward to receive the red cloth badge, in the shape 
of a cross, and worn on the shoulder. Wealth, arms, troops, 
lives, were offered. It was understood that death in the Cru- 
sade was the certain way to paradise. "The peace of God" 
was adopted for the nations at home, though not fully kept, 
especially in Germany, where Henry IV had wars of his own. 
Bishops went to their dioceses preaching this military Chris- 
tianity. Women urged husbands and sons to enlist. Monks 
ordered swords to be made. Shops became empty ; fields were 



*" Urban determined to make a diversion which should bring him more 
prominently forward as the head of Christendom." (Van Laun.) 



CRUSADING ARMIES. 275 

left to weeds. Jewish bankers granted heavy loans on real 
estate, and the treasurers of convents took rolls of mortgages. 
Land fell in price; horses rose in the market. Great sinners 
enlisted to commute their penances; for it was said that "God 
had instituted a new method of cleansing sins." The robber, 
the outlaw, the profligate, the debtor, found an amnesty. 
Europe was now an agitated sea, throwing wave after wave 
upon Syrian shores. The vast companies that marched may 
be reduced to two classes : 

1. The unorganized bands. There were four or five of 
them, who knew nothing of military discipline, and cared less, 
for they seemed to presume upon miracles. In the goat and 
goose that led them they thought the guiding spirit resided. 
Chief of these was the horde of monks, peasants, women, 
children, and a motley rabble of all sorts, led by Peter the 
Hermit and Walter the Penniless Knight. At Cologne these 
incapable leaders took each his train. By different routes, each 
long marked by a ghastly line of human bones, they reached 
Constantinople. The Emperor Alexis advised them to wait until 
the princely generals should come with their armies, but they 
wanted no advice. The foam of the glory must be theirs, and 
dashing over into Asia, they nearly all sank out of human sight. 
A few escaped. We can hardly think that two hundred and 
fifty thousand of them were killed. Many doubtless became 
the slaves of Greeks and Saracens. Peter hailed the advance 
of the wiser warriors, and retired to a convent. 

2. The disciplined hosts, under such leaders as Godfrey 
of Bouillon, the two Roberts of Normandy and Flanders, Ray- 
mond of Toulouse, and Tancred, the nephew of Robert Guis- 
card. They reached Constantinople by different routes. In 
Bithynia they claimed to have one hundred thousand horsemen, 
and six hundred thousand footmen: with the latter was a 
vast company of women and sutlers. They captured Nice, 
which was then a Sultan's capital. They put Antioch under a 
most dreadful siege until it fell. Their leaders quarreled, and 
thousands of their followers died of heat, famine, and plague. 
Baldwin seized Edessa. His brother Godfrey battered the 
walls of Jerusalem through forty days. When its gates were 
forced (1099) the Christian cross was stained with the blood of 
seventy thousand Turks, who were slaughtered. Godfrey, the 



276 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

wise, genial, devout, generous warrior, a monk in appearance, 
" a lamb in his own affairs, a lion in the cause of God," led his 
men to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and there gave 
thanks for the ability to redeem their vows. He was elected 
ruler of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, then founded. He 
refused to wear a crown of gold where his Savior had worn a 
crown of thorns, and assumed no higher title than that of 
Advocate and Baron of the Holy Sepulcher. He lived only 
one year longer, and left the noblest name of all the early 
crusaders. 

Forty years later Edessa fell to the Saracens. St. Bernard 
preached the second Crusade (1144) and said that so many peo- 
ple enlisted in it that there were left in many cities scarcely one 
man to seven women. Seven other crusades followed, besides 
the foolish attempts of the children, and those against the 
Albigenses and Waldenses. They reach on into the thirteenth 
century.* They utterly failed to retain the Holy Land, or plant 
any permanent colonies in the East. Their greatest effects 
were not in Asia, but in Europe. The loss of life was immense 
(nearly two millions of Europeans perished ), and yet many of 
these would doubtless have fallen in those battles which were 
checked at home. They died in a war which was defensive, in 
many respects, for had not the crusades rolled back the tide of 
Saracen conquest we might read of Mohammedan invasions in 
Europe far more destructive than those of the Crusaders whose 
work was not altogether one of mad fanaticism. 

We notice some of the effects — good and evil, direct and re- 
mote. 1. The local and sectional feelings were broadened. 
Feudalism, the first support of the Crusades, was almost struck 
down by them. The royal court had been the center of the 
barons ; the baronial castle the center of the land-renters. The 
monks revolved around their convents. Every class of people 
had its circle, and in that was its world. When scores of Cru- 
saders first started they knew not how many hundreds of miles 
it was to Jerusalem, and they died of weariness, or turned back 
before they had gone one-third of the way. It was some gain 
to learn geography. Returning warriors and traders told long 
stories about other lands, peoples, languages, cities, buildings, 
and productions. In time such travelers as Marco Polo and Sir 

* See Note I. 



EFFECTS OF THE CRUSADES. 277 

John Mandeville (one of the first writers of modern English 
speech) roamed widely on other continents. The earth seemed 
larger to Europeans. 2. International relations were affected. 
The Greeks grew weary of entertaining armies, and the chasm 
between them and the West was left wider than ever ; the Greek 
and Latin Churches being hopelessly sundered. The Moham- 
medans came to be better known. They ceased to be regarded 
as monsters : they were really human, and some of them hu- 
mane, especially such men as Saladin ; and they had some stores 
of knowledge worth learning, as well as a politeness worth imi- 
tating. Commerce began and created new enterprise in such 
cities as Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, and these, with their imita- 
tors, grew into the Italian republics. Articles of Oriental com- 
fort and luxury were brought from the East. 3. The West- 
ern nations, having for the first time one common cause, and 
acting in concert, came into more unity, with a better knowl- 
edge of each other, and with more generous sentiments. 
Feudal relations were gradually cast aside: men followed the 
leader whom they preferred. All classes learned more of each 
other. Great social changes occurred. Despotisms were shaken ; 
the people became more free, more cultured, active, and vigor- 
ous. 4. The contemporary intellectual movements received 
some aid. 5. Chivalry, with its basis of three words — war, 
woman, and religion — cultivated a high sense of honor, and 
compassion for the oppressed. "Chivalry became more relig- 
ious, and religion more chivalrous," until neither gained by the 
union. The one Lady who came to be ever recognized was 
the Virgin Mary, " Notre Dame." The very word cotirtesy was 
brought into life. The social manners began to assume a higher 
refinement. 6. The orders of the Hospitalers and Templars 
arose, for the care of the sick and wounded. 7. The Church 
was affected from the papacy to the remotest parish. Its wealth 
was vastly increased. Estates were left to it by men who fell 
in the wars. Monasteries bought up mortgages. Endowments 
were thought to be means of salvation. Older forms of per- 
verted devotion were strengthened : such as the worship of 
saints, the imagination and pretension of miracles, the tendency 
to materialize religion, the storing up of merits won for the 
soul by courage and suffering, and the eagerness for relics. 
"It was sensuous, turning to the outward; seeking the sepul- 



278 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

cher of Christ rather than cultivating his spirit; it was, in 
fact, Christianity externalized." The Jews were more intensely 
hated, and often put to massacre, even after St. Bernard pleaded 
for them with his noblest eloquence. Crusading devotion was 
slow in becoming humane. The popes gained higher power 
over the men and money of Europe ; to resist them was treason 
and infidelity. The clergy was sadly demoralized. The general 
morals of the people were injured. But still the minds of men 
were greatly aroused, the intellect leaped into fuller liberty, 
and the Crusades did something to prepare an audience for 
V Wyclif, and Tauler, and Luther. 

Before the Crusades roused the mind to profitable inquiry, 
an intellectual movement had quietly begun, among scholars, 
or had continued on after Berengar, whence the name, Scholas- 
ticism. I shall not measure the little rills which came down 
through dark woods from the schools of Charlemagne, but 
take them where they meet in a stream broad enough to flow 
in the sunlight. Imperfect as the system was, it was a great 
advance of human thought beyond the materializing spirit of 
the tenth century. It has been ''much decried and much 
exalted, but very little studied." The schoolmen left their 
ideas in such enormous piles, such huge folios and so many of 
them, that men gaze on them as they do at the pyramids, and 
think of them as tombs of ideas that once reigned. Yet they 
did more than rear "cathedrals of syllogism," and discuss friv- 
olous or valueless questions. They are worthy of study as 
thinkers in a fighting age, the first philosophers of the Western 
races, and their most daring explorers in the realm of theology, 
the founders of an alliance between reason and faith, and 
theorists whose solutions of metaphysical and ethical problems 
find respect, if not acceptance, in our day. They did not 
frame creeds : they built systems. 

There are three elements in scholasticism: 1. Logic, or dia- 
lectics. 2. Philosophy. These two at first came second-hand, 
through such compends and translations as those of Cassiodorus 
and Boethius, the trivium and quadrivium, or the Pseudo-Dio- 
' nysius. In the degree that men came to know the whole logic 
and philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, scholasticism rose to 
its height. Logic was used as a method of proving truth, and 
even of discovering it. 3. Theology, in the scientific form to 



AIM OF THE SCHOOLMEN. 279 

which logic reduced it, and not on the basis of Biblical exegesis. 
The Bible was quoted, but the purpose was not to find and 
teach what it contains, so much as to search out the truths 
which lie in the depths beyond it, and arguments that inspira- 
tion has not employed. The attempt seemed to be to scale 
heaven, and think the thoughts of God. The creeds of the 
Church were used, but they were often the points of departure 
into the realms of mystery. This third element came from such 
men as John of Damascus (754), a Greek scholar, who first 
put theology into scientific, logical form, in his "Exposition of 
Faith," quoting largely from the Christian fathers. Hildebert 
of Tours (died 1 1 35) composed a "Systematic Theology." His 
method was to establish each doctrine by Scripture, and by 
quotations from the Fathers, and solve the difficulties by the 
aid of reason, logic, and philosophy. He warned men against 
the pursuit of dialectics, or the art of reasoning on theology in 
the dry logical formulas. He thought it vain and dangerous, 
preferring to rest in that simple and unquestioning faith which, 
he said, was not contrary to reason. Faith presumes the want 
of sight and of perfect knowledge. He said that God chooses 
neither to be fully comprehended, for thus faith is not deprived 
of its proper merit ; nor to be wholly unknown, and thus there 
is no excuse for unbelief. St. Bernard called him ' ' a great pil- 
lar of the Church." His philosophy was that of Cicero and 
Seneca. He may be considered a forerunner of the Mystics. 

Scholastic philosophy was the child of John Scotus, but it 
was more fully developed by Abelard. Of the scholastic the- 
ology Anselm is called the father. They were blended for a 
long time. Few of the schoolmen meant to be unscriptural 
rationalists; most of them aimed to be consistent with Biblical 
teachings, and they largely quoted the Bible as inspired. 
They employed philosophy to define and maintain the doctrines 
of the Church in their time, some of which — e. g., transubstan- 
tiation, supererogation, saint-worship — required the subtilties 
of dialectics, for the evidence of Holy Scripture was wanting. 
They furnish methods rather than materials of thought. The 
system had its rise, culmination, and decline ; hence three pe- 
riods. Only representative men and ideas are here noticed.* 

I. The period when theology takes form (1060-1200). 

*On Realism and on certain Schoolmen, see Notes II. III. 



280 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

There were theologians before Anselm. Probably his teacher, 
Lanfranc, at Bee, wrote the "Dialogue embracing the sum 
of all theology." It sets forth the doctrines of the Church at 
that time in genuine scholastic style, with the syllogism at 
every point, and the discussion of proofs and counter-proofs. 
It raises such questions as whether clothes will be worn in the 
future life? How will the bodies of the lost be placed in hell? 
Lanfranc gave to Bee a scholastic method of thought. 

There is a charm in the personal life of Anselm. Rarely 
has a man of gentle spirit, unselfish nature, unambitious aims, 
child-like faith, and profound thought, so closely touched the 
historical events of his own time. He was born in 1033, at 
Aosta,* at the foot of Mount Rosa, in Piedmont. The snow- 
covered Alps were to the dreaming boy as the great white 
throne of God. He imagined that there he visited the heav- 
enly king and ate bread at his table. Like Calvin he had a 
mother who led him to sublime thoughts of God, and when 
she died he wished to enter a convent. But like Augustine he 
had a dissipated father (a rich man), who stormed against him 
until he thought of chivalry as the only other honorable pro- 
fession for a man in that time. He left his father, who wasted 
his property, and died a monk. Wandering into France, An- 
selm came to Bee, not twenty years of age, and under Lan- 
franc he became student, monk, thinker, teacher, and marvel- 
ous manager of boys. When appointed abbot there he showed 
the tutors the folly of brutally flogging the pupils, and the 
wisdom of softening bad natures by patience, firmness, and 
tenderness. Even the terrible conqueror grew gentle with An- 
selm. To seek a man's spiritual welfare was his first object. 
Through all his life, in primate's chair or in exile, he knew no 
spot so delightful as that narrow cell at Bee, where he mused 
on deep problems till his mind reeled on the verge of the infi- 
nite, and yet never endangered his child-like faith. To the last 
he loved that Norman chapel where he had wept, prayed, and 
breathed the air of heaven. His errors were those which clung 
to all men of that time, but his personal virtues were rare, and 
his intellectual services enduring. He disliked public life. He 
must have smiled when he wrote, ' ' With my monks about me 

* Just about five hundred years before Calvin seems to have thought of set- 
tling there. 



ANSELM IN ENGLAND. 28 1 

I am like the owl. When she sits quiet with her little ones 
in the cave, she is happy, all goes well with the owl ; but when 
she ventures out, and falls among the crows and the rooks, with 
their beaks and claws it fares ill with the owl." 

William Rufus (i 087-1100) was now king of England. 
One who knew him said that "he feared God but little, and 
men not at all." He was utterly profane, reckless, profligate, 
making a gain of the Church by keeping many bishoprics and 
abbacies void, and taking the revenues for his own uses. But 
during a serious illness he promised to fill the chair at Canter- 
bury, now about four years vacant, and he chose Anselm 
(1093), who was snared into the office by craft. Anselm's 
troubles began. He was forced into a hero's career. The 
king returned to his vices and avarice, but he soon had to face 
a man whose meek and loving temper rose into firmness and 
grandeur when it fronted dishonesty and tyranny ; all turned 
upon the right of investiture. Should the king or the pope 
give him the keys of office? William thought one way, and 
Anselm another. "The pope should do it," said the arch- 
bishop. Hence the controversy. At length the king de- 
manded one thousand pounds as the conditions of peace. 
Anselm offered half that sum. It was refused; he gave it to 
the poor, and said to the tyrant, ' ' Treat me as a free man, and 
I am at your service with all I have ; but if you treat me as 
your slave, you shall have neither me nor mine." He went into 
the cathedral of Canterbury, bade farewell to the canons at 
the altar, took his pilgrim's staff, wallet, and scallop-shell, and 
wandered into France. He appealed to the pope, and thus 
began among English Churchmen that system of inviting the 
aid of Rome in English affairs. His theory was that a king 
had no right to install a man in any office of the Church ; his 
error was in asking a pope, and not a council, to do it. 
In 1 100 he heard of the king's death ; he wept over that 
poor soul. 

King Henry I (1100-35) invited him back, and when he 
went his wisdom was needed. The king was to wed Matilda, 
whose Saxon mother was the famous queen, St: Margaret, of 
Scotland. But the princess wore the veil of a nun, and how 
was she to get rid of it? To Anselm she told her story that 
her aunt had forced it upon her as a safeguard when rude sol- 



282 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

diery and lawless tramps were every- where, and said Maud, 
"I was indignant with grief. Whenever I could get out of her 
sight I flung it down and trampled on it. That was the way I 
was veiled." Anselm declared that, as her vow was made 
against her will, she was free from all its bonds, and when 
he placed the crown upon her brows an English shout went up 
which Norman bishops and barons might think full of doom, 
unless it presaged a union of races. For now both a king 
and a queen, in whom ran the blood of Alfred, shared the 
throne.* It did help to weld the two peoples. But the investi- 
ture came up again with the old difference, and Anselm was 
soon in exile, a dozen schemers making affairs worse, until 
Queen "Maud the Good," his correspondent all these years, 
was delighted to welcome him home. The variances were 
compromised at a Westminster Council (1107), and if Anselm 
was victorious he was not haughty in his power. The canons 
against clerical marriages were not severely enforced, for even 
the pope allowed the sons of presbyters to be ordained, saying 
that almost the greater and better part of the English clergy 
were of the married class. The Hildebrandine reforms were 
generally promoted. Three years of episcopal work closed his 
life, and one of Anselm's last wishes was that his Lord might 
spare him just long enough to solve a question as to the 
origin of the soul, for he feared that no else would ever be 
able to solve it. The Christianity that produced an Anselm 
had not utterly lost its life. 

Anselm was not an orator ; the revival of preaching had not 
begun. To believe, love, think, and teach were his chief aims, 
and he put faith first as the best means to all the rest. "I be- 
lieve in order that I may understand," said this new Augustine. 
Accept the creed, and then search out the reasons for it. Let 
orthodoxy have the support of philosophy. f "The substance 
of faith can not be made more certain by means of the knowl- 
edge that grows out of it ; for it is in itself eternally sure and 
fixed. But while the believer holds fast to it without doubting, 



*In that feudal age it was comforting for an Anglo-Saxon to know that 
Henry's mother, Matilda, of Flanders, and his wife, Matilda, of Scotland, were 
both descendants of King Alfred. 

f Anselm did not feed on the writings of Aristotle, but Augustine and 
the Bible. 



CUR DEUS HOMO. 283 

loves it, and lives for this faith, he may and should search 
humbly for the grounds of its truth. If to his faith he is able 
to add intelligence, let him thank God ; if not, then let him 
not turn against his faith, but bow his head and worship. For 
human wisdom will sooner destroy itself on this rock than move 
the rock." Reason must serve faith, not control it. 

In his Monologium and Proslogium (Faith in search of Un- 
derstanding), his reasoning often takes the form of a prayer, 
or a conversation with his Lord. Once he was passing wakeful 
hours, fasting, and struggling to reach a great thought and a 
new mode of proving the existence of God, when the ontolog- 
ical argument broke in upon his mind. In excessive joy he 
seized his tablet and wrote it : ' ' That which exists in re [in re- 
ality, objectively] is greater than that which exists only in the 
mind [subjectively]. That existence than which nothing greater 
can be conceived in the mind is God." He held that the non- 
existence of the Divine Being can not even be conceived. The 
basis of this is realism.* 

The Cur Deus Homo created an epoch and a school in the- 
ology. It is the most spiritual, practical, and popular of all 
the writings of Anselm. It shows a deep knowledge of Holy 
Scripture. It proposes the most interesting of all questions for 
the human soul, Why was God man ? It treats of the Incar- 
nation, and of the satisfaction which the nature and law of God 
demanded as the means of redeeming sinners. ' ' The satisfac- 
tion can be made by none save God, and ought to be made by 
none save man ; it is necessary that God-man should make 
it. The restoration of the human race could not 

have been accomplished unless man paid the debt which he 
owed to God for his sin ; and this debt was so great that no 
one could pay it except God ; hence the same person who 
pays it should be man and God. . . . The life of this 
man (God incarnate) is so exalted and precious that it is 
able to pay what is owing for the sins of the whole world, 
and infinitely more. . . . Christ is our salvation, as 
through our belief in him we have access to the Father." 



*The above is the merest summary of his argument. It was opposed by 
the monk Gaunilo. It did not find favor with the schoolmen generally. It 
was revived by Descartes (died 1650) and substantially by Dr. Samuel Clarke 
and Cousin. It is not now usually regarded as valid. 



284 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

This doctrine swept out the theory, too prevalent for cen- 
turies, that Christ paid a ransom to Satan in order to purchase 
our release. It struck hard upon the current and generally 
sanctioned ideas of penance, self-chastisement, and human merit 
purchased by gifts, works, and purgatory. In his "Direction to 
the Sick" Anselm has this: "Put all thy confidence in this 
death (of Christ) alone, place thy trust in no other thing ; com- 
mit thyself wholly to this death, cover thyself with it, and if 
God would judge thee, say, Lord, I place the death of our 
Lord Jesus Christ between me and thy judgment. 
And if he shall say, that thou art a sinner, say, I place the 
death of Christ between me and my sins. ... I offer his 
merits instead of {pro) my own, which I ought to have, but 
have not." This proves that Anselm was not a cold, icy lo- 
gician. This doctrine runs through four centuries as a stream in 
the desert, now giving drink to a little band of pilgrims led by 
Bernard or Wyclif, or Wessel ; now almost lost in the sands 
upon which multitudes do penance, or fall in worship of the 
saints ; and then it bursts forth amid green pastures where 
Luther and other reformers lead the flock of God. Writers 
who do not adopt it in all its bearings have said that it is "a 
profound and original theory of the atonement which, whether 
accepted or impugned, has molded the character of all Christian 
doctrine ever since." They pay a large "tribute of admiration 
and gratitude to the serene wisdom of a thinker who was able, in 
the midst of cruelty and confusion, to devise a scheme which 
has helped millions of his fellow-men to interpret the central mys- 
tery of suffering and reconcile the ideas of justice and mercy." 
Thus by a Norman brook began the European effort to 
bring Reason into the loyal service of Faith ; to reduce the 
principles of truth, in the world of nature and revelation, to a 
blessed and logical order; and to present theology as a rounded 
system of ordered thought. The name of Anselm may re- 
mind us that, whatever the failures of the schoolmen, "their 
work, in its origin, was inspired by a magnanimous and grand 
thought. The great awakening of the European mind, under 
the leadership of the Church, suggested to the thinker the 
idea of a glorious whole, or Kingdom of Truth, pervious to the 
Reason that is prepared by Faith. . . . The scholastic 
enterprise was an attempt to set up that kingdom. It failed, 



ABELARD. 28$ 

indeed, . . . but ever since then the idea of Theology as 
a science has been far more powerfully and constantly present 
to the contemplation of divines."* The march of mind had 
begun; to arrest it was as impossible as to stop the crusades, 
or to abolish the papacy. In it there were reactions and 
counter-movements. Discussion assumed its rights, and it was 
kept alive and fresh by Roscelin with his nominalism, Abe- 
lard with his rationalism, Bernard, the reviver of preaching, and 
the Victors who brought the heart to aid the intellect. 

"Reason, rational insight, must prepare the way for faith," 
said Abelard, reversing Anselm's maxim, "since without a 
rational understanding of truth, faith is not sure of its princi- 
ples. " Then one can believe only what one comprehends: 
mysteries are not objects of faith, until dissected by logic. 
Faith grows out of argument. The first thing is to doubt, next 
to dispute, and then to believe whatever is understood. From 
this point of departure Peter Abelard went with his lance 
against all the schools. No man appears in history in a greater 
variety of lights and shadows. Sentimentalists dwell on his great 
scandal, and immortalize him as the teacher, lover, seducer, 
and husband of Heloise; he retiring to build up the philosoph- 
ical monastery of the Paraclete, and leaving it to her and her 
nuns ; and she pitying him in his calamities, and reproving 
him in her letters for his cold selfishness, almost coarse for 
age and sorrow. Critics have questioned the power of his 
brilliant mind. Philosophers have exalted him into a hero and 
the founder of the system which Descartes exploded. Moral- 
ists have been repulsed by his ethics. Churchmen have writ- 
ten him a heretic. Admirers have praised him as one of the 
few men who could write his own life with bald honesty, in the 
"Book of my Calamities." 

"I sprang," he says, "from Brittany, whose soil is thin, and 
the temper of its (Celtic) people is light. I had a wonderful 
facility for acquiring knowledge. My father had some taste 
for letters before he went to the wars. He wished his boys to 
be scholars before they became soldiers. He educated me 
carefully. ... I preferred dialectical reasoning to all other 
modes of philosophy. So, traveling through different prov- 
inces, wherever I heard that this art of disputation was flourish- 

* Rainy, Develop, of Chr. Doctrine, page 369. 



286 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ing, thither I went, practicing by the way, and became a rival of 
the peripatetics." He was not twenty (1090) when this knight- 
errantry made him a champion to be dreaded in the scholastic 
tilting-matches. He was self-confident, arrogant, ' ' wickedly as- 
tute," obstinate, differing from every body, and bent upon vic- 
tory every-where. He had quite baffled his teacher, Roscelin, 
whose nominalism led him to say that the three persons of the 
Trinity were three individual essences, whence the inference 
that he taught tritheism ; but when refuted by Anselm, and 
arraigned by a council, he recanted the imputed doctrine, went 
to England and there died. 

The Church rather than Abelard brought nominalism into 
discredit. He verged upon conceptualism. At Paris the young 
logician went into the crowded school of William of Champeaux, 
won the affection of the lecturer, then vanquished the popular 
realist. Poor William lost his students, and became Bishop of 
Chalons. The master of the field soon went to Laon where 
another Anselm was teaching theology with good success, per- 
plexed him, ridiculed him, and said, "When this Anselm kin- 
dles a fire, he fills the house with smoke. You students have 
come to a beautiful tree on which there is nothing but leaves." 
He took the desk ; the students laughed, then listened, then ad- 
mired. One day he was jesting with them, and saying that the 
theologians were only limping in the track of the fathers, when 
they bantered him to give them a specimen of his skill in elic- 
iting new truths from Scripture. He boldly mounted the ros- 
trum, opened Ezekiel's prophecy just because it was obscure, 
and said, "It is my custom to trust, not to experience, but to 
intuition." The students found that to be true, but were 
charmed with intuitive comments such as had never been heard 
of before. Anselm was again amazed at the reckless genius 
of the man. 

Abelard was certainly rousing minds from their sleep, what- 
ever the moral effect was upon them. Logic was let loose to 
start inquiry. It is easy to account for his success. He spoke 
in the common language and to the common intellect. Every 
body got from him a clear idea of some sort. So hungry were 
the people for intelligible words and ideas, that they did not 
test their moral quality, or they were glad to hear doctrines 
which relieved them from penitence and faith. Religion melted 



BERNARD. 287 

away in his hands. Morality was reduced to humanity, beliefs 
to mere opinions. The waiting students at Paris, thousands of 
them, sang his amorous songs in the streets (for he could be a 
troubadour), and when he came back the ways were thronged, 
and women gazed at him from curtained windows. The pope 
sent him hearers. The world was rushing after him. He 
reigned with the scepter of pretentious logic. His successes 
made him giddy, and he fell, at the age of thirty, without any 
faith, or former piety to aid him towards a restoration. After 
his crime, his secret marriage, his deep disgrace, and no little 
cruel treatment from others, he entered the convent of St. 
Denys, a wrecked genius. But he began to reform the monks, 
and teach a few pupils. More came, and still more, until he 
had a crowd. "I began to lecture to them," he says, "on 
theology, as a hook to draw them to the study of philosophy." 
He published an "Introduction to Theology,"* assumed to be 
a professor of that science, asserted the dynamistic Trinity, 
stood a trial for heresy, was condemned, went into the forests 
near Troyes, built up the Paraclete, and drew crowds again to 
his philosophic community. Men left castles and cities to sleep 
on straw, eat herbs and barley bread, and hear new ideas. It 
was a sign that scores of men were weary of the religion of 
priests and monks and penances and missals. Not knowing 
what they really needed, they came to get what stimulus was 
offered them. Here, then, was a wonderful mental movement. 
We leave Abelard until we trace another man of a better, but 
scarcely less popular, kind. 

Bernard is here introduced, not as a man of the schools, but 
of the convent, the pulpit, the reform, and the timely protest 
against the evils of scholasticism. No private churchman ever 
held a greater personal influence over an age. A preaching 
monk reigned by virtues, truths, courage, and eloquence. Born 
in Burgundy in 109 1, of a noble family, his earliest expansion 
of mind came by means of the rush to the first Crusade, and 
the teachings of a pious mother who led his thoughts to 
God. At the age of twenty-two he and five brothers, with 
twenty-five young friends, entered the monastery of the Cister- 
cians, at Citeaux, where Stephen Harding, an Englishman, was 

* His Sic et Non (Yes and No) was a compend of theological quotations set 
against each other, perhaps to be an apple of discord among the Churchmen. 



288 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

establishing his reforms and founding a new order of monks 
with a confederation of its religious houses. Bernard was a 
monk of the most rigorous sort, almost ruining his health by his 
austerities. He diligently read the Divine Word, and studied 
God's works, to find what light they threw upon each other, 
and how the spiritual life of the one might correspond to the 
natural life of the other. Yet the life of his soul never attained 
the Christian naturalness which the apostles and the very oaks 
were teaching him. He said the beeches taught him oratory. 
1 ' Believe me who have tried : there is more in woods than in 
books. Rocks will tell you what school-masters never declare." 
But he did not throw aside his books. If Harding gave law to 
the new order, Bernard gave it reputation. 

With a small colony of monks he went up into Champaigne, 
built huts in the valley of Wormwood, which was infamous as 
a den of robbers, cleared some of its lands, and established the 
monastery of Clairvaux {Clara Vallis). Thousands flocked to 
it. There he might have died in his self-punishments, had not 
William of Champeaux urged him to devote his talents to a 
nobler cause, and ordained him to preach. Then began ' ' that 
series of marvelous sermons which won for him the title of the 
last of the Fathers." They show that he was well versed in 
Scripture, and that he knew all about ordinary life in farm- 
houses, villages, remote woods, and gay cities. He spoke to 
the heart of the people. He was not entirely free from the 
errors of the Church at that time. But his sermons ring with 
great truths. He was the restorer of preaching in that age. 
He had nothing of outward looks to commend him except his 
love-lit face. A little, stooping man, with frosted red beard, 
white silken hair shaved close on his crown, thin cheeks, with 
scarcely a tinge of blood in them, meekly and suddenly stepped 
before a vast crowd, and he spoke as one sent from another 
world. He moved them at his will. He excited them so that 
mothers held fast to their sons, and wives to their husbands, 
lest they should turn monks. He wrought conversions by the 
score; and entreated every hearer to remember the wondrous 
love of God, and the "passive action, the active passion," the 
crown of thorns, the scourge, the cross, the nails, the dripping 
blood, the cries, the agonies, the death of their dear Lord Jesus ; 
and never again despise the crucified, nor do despite to the 



REVIVAL OF PREACHING— BERNARD. 289 

Spirit of grace. The sermon ended, he was as suddenly gone 
to his booth in the forest, there comforting himself with the 
Song of Songs, the Gospel of John, and his almost ceaseless 
prayers. His charity was equal to his zeal. It was in him as 
a well of just humanity and the love of Christ. When the Jews 
were regarded as miscreants and usurers, and crusaders struck 
them down as guiltier men than Saracens, his soul blazed into 
a flame of wrath and pity, and he cried loudly against the out- 
rages; "The Jews were not doomed by our Lord to be mur- 
dered, but to be dispersed among the nations who ought to 
seek their conversion." 

In his preaching he was a reformer, as well as in his hun- 
dreds of letters which went through the world from the north 
of Ireland to the poor Church in Jerusalem. Their tone was, 
"Do not ornament your Churches so much with images and 
carvings and emblematic windows, for these divert the mincls 
of the hearers. I can not longer say that the clergy are as bad 
as the people, for they have become even worse. And Brother 
Peter the Venerable, of Cluny, you know that many abbots of 
your order have sixty horses in their stalls, and wines whose 
variety is a boast, and all sorts of equipage, finery and furni- 
ture. " Peter began a reform. Bernard sustained the papal theory 
of Hildebrand, but his rebukes fell upon some of the popes 
with scorching severity. Rome was not to him a holy city. 

The unsought position of a dictator was freely accorded to 
him, so that he was the confidant of monarchs, the arbiter 
between rival popes, the conductor of the most delicate affairs 
of diplomacy, the censor of public morals, the oracle of his 
age. He never played courtier, never fawned on the rich and 
the great. He would write ten lines to an English king about 
his national affairs, and ten pages to a poor monk who was 
groping for spiritual light. He was the adviser of the brethren 
in one hundred and sixty new convents of his order. All 
Europe was in controversy on the question whether Innocent II 
had been justly driven out of Rome by Anacletus, the anti- 
pope. Innocent visited Clairvaux and was delighted with the 
earthen floor, naked walls, rude tables, scanty fare, and the 
low chant of psalms, but he perhaps did not understand how 
this mode of life failed to remedy the insanity of one poor 
monk who shouted out in the choir, "I am Christ." Bernard 

19 



29O HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

commanded the evil spirit to depart from the man, and the 
happy result was accounted one of his miracles. Then he took 
Innocent by the hand, led him through the cities, introduced 
him to the people who cared less to see a pope than to touch 
the saint or secure a thread of his gown, and he placed his 
friend on the papal throne. The opposing powers must submit 
to it, for the monk and the German emperor had settled the 
question. He aided the next Innocent against the Albigenses, 
as we shall see. While he lived his word was almost law to 
Europe, and for ages after his death he was thought to have 
had scarcely a fault. 

He was not a learned man, and yet his commentaries show 
good sense. He was Augustinian in theology. It is said that 
there is not an essential doctrine of the Gospel which he did 
not embrace with zeal, defend by argument, and adorn by life. 
If Anselm would join faith to reason, Bernard would connect 
faith with love and holy living. If one seemed to say, ' ■ Believe 
and think," the other said, "Believe and love. The heart 
makes the theologian." Both were devout men. But Bernard 
held that what went to a man's heart and sanctified it was true 
in theology. Experience was a better test of truth than reason ; 
meditation was better than logic, and love was the best of life. 

He has been charged with intolerance towards Abelard. 
This should be said: He did not begin the attack upon the 
erring philosopher, nor ever make capital of his great crime. 
William of St. Thierry wrote to Bernard, laying before him 
certain heresies, and adding: "God knows how I loved him, 
and wished to love him. But in a case like this no one shall 
ever be my friend or neighbor. Nor can this evil be rectified 
by. private means; he has made it public." Bernard replied 
that "all this was new and strange to him." He did all he 
could by a personal interview. He could not well refrain from 
exposing such errors as these: that crime consists not in the 
act, but in the intention; that we inherit from Adam, not sin, 
but misfortune ; that God's love saves us, and not any supposed 
merit or satisfaction in Christ's death; that the life and death 
of Christ were merely intended to create a moral impression on 
men, and that nothing but penitence is necessary to secure the 
pardon of sin. Bernard felt that the Church must express itself 
against Pelagianism, and what has since been called Socinianism. 



ABELARD CONDEMNED. 29I 

The council of Sens (1140) began the case. Bernard was there 
in the lead of the prosecution. Suddenly Abelard appealed to 
Rome. The bishops went on with it. Sens condemned him 
undefended; Rome condemned him unheard. But he was 
already silent. On his way to Rome he had fallen sick, and he 
found his last great friend in Peter the Venerable, the excellent 
abbot of Cluny, who nursed both his body and soul, reconciled 
him to Bernard, and thus entreated Pope Innocent: "Be pleased 
to let him spend the rest of his days in your Cluny. It will de- 
light us all. He may benefit the brethren with his knowledge. 
Let him not be driven from that roof to which he has fled as 
a sparrow." The request was granted. There he lived until 
near his death, in 1142, and Peter said that his last days were 
spiritually his best days. He left no school of followers, unless 
they be found in far later times. But he moved his own age. 

The strongest logical opponents of Abelard were the Victors 
(monks of St. Victor), Walter, Richard, and Hugh, who was a 
sort of living cyclopaedia. The school from which Abelard had 
driven William came into their hands, and was one of the 
group which afterwards formed the University of Paris. They 
sought to unite the views of Anselm and Bernard, and make 
piety of heart, spirituality, as prominent as faith and reason. 
They were mystics of the better kind. "By the devotion that 
proceeds from faith the believer's heart is purified; by purifica- 
tion he reaches higher knowledge and certainty (or conviction 
of truth and of God) ; by contemplation he finds God present 
with him, and, even though a world of miracles should inter- 
pose, his heart can not be drawn away from its faith in God 
and its love to him." These men held that faith acts not 
simply through the intellect, but through the affections. 

In sympathy with them was Robert Pullen, an Englishman 
at Oxford (whose university was now fairly started), lecturing 
on Holy Scripture and theology, and preaching to three thou- 
sand students, whose numbers, it is rather largely said, increased 
soon to thirty thousand. He put forth a "Book of Sentences" 
in theology, and became a cardinal at Rome. John of Salis- 
bury, an Englishman in France, a pupil of Abelard, a bishop 
of Chartres (1176), was the Erasmus of his day. He is an 
amusing critic, when he says of the pedants in philosophy: 
"They live in words. They go about the streets and pester 



292 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

men more learned than themselves with words, words, words. 
They make themselves not understood, and then reckon them- 
selves philosophers." His writings are still in the market. 
Giraldus Cambrensis, a Welshman, sat among the students of 
law at Bologna (a rising university), where the monk, Gratian, 
(11 50), made the famous digest of Canon Law, embodying in 
it the false decretals. Thus we might trace the steps of many 
scholars in the rising schools of that age. 

The scholastic theology, which had taken form with Lan- 
franc and Anselm, was solidified by a man from their country, 
Peter the Lombard. He studied with Abelard, St. Bernard, 
and the Victors. He was bishop of Paris (11 59-1 164), and 
attained great eminence by his sentences — Liber Sententiarum.* 

Its statements were not original nor bold, but its neat form, 
clear method, nicely drawn distinctions, made it the popular 
hand-book for students, and the base-line for new speculations. 
It did not exhaust the scholastic genius. ' ' The divines of that 
day had one eye fixed on the Bible, and the other on Aristotle." 
Every thing was to be demonstrated, and they spent their lives 
in the effort. 

II. The period in which philosophy reached its height and 
theology founded two schools (1200- 1 300). The union of the 
two systems was the chief intellectual work of the thirteenth cen- 
tury. Plato, the real favorite of the Church, and Aristotle, of 
the logicians, were then quite fully known. Their writings had 
come into the West through the Crusaders, and especially the 
Arabian schools in Spain. The two new orders of monks, or 
friars, f supplied most of the great thinkers. The Franciscans, 
or Grey Friars, took their name from. St. Francis of Assisi, in 
Italy, a reformed prodigal, a kindly-hearted, illiterate enthusiast, 
who grieved over the vices of the clergy, the idle luxury of the 
rich monks, and the ignorance of the people, to whom no one 



* In the sixteenth century Osiander, when opposing the Reformers, made 
this remarkable estimate: "Peter Lombard is worth one hundred Luthers, two 
hundred Melancthons, three hundred Bullingers, four hundred Peter Martyrs, 
and five hundred Calvins. If the whole of them (except Peter) were all pounded 
together in a mortar, they would not produce one ounce of sacred divinity." 
Osiander must have known that Lombard was called "the Euclid of the scho- 
lastic theology." 

t To evade the law of a council which forbade the creation of new orders 
of monks, they were commissioned as fnars (brothers, regular clergy). 



THE DOMINICANS. 293 

seemed to think of preaching. To remedy these evils he taught 
the duty of renouncing all worldly goods, and going to work 
for the Church. He intensified the rigors of monastic life. In 
1207, at the age of twenty-five, he began his labors among the 
lepers of a hospital. Then he became a wandering beggar, 
expending his collections in the repair of rural churches. Lest 
the leathern girdle might seem too rich, he adopted the hempen 
cord, whence the name of Cordeliers. He had powerful elo- 
quence, and soon had hundreds of followers. Preaching to all 
classes, especially the neglected poor, was chosen as the busi- 
ness of this new order. The Dominicans were the order of St. 
Dominic, a Spaniard, who began his chief work at Toulouse in 
the persecution of the Albigenses, for which he organized the 
"Militia of Christ." Not content with persuasive preaching, 
he helped to construct the Inquisition to give a decided effect 
to his eloquent sermons. Southey asserts that "he is the only 
saint in whom no solitary speck of goodness can be discovered." 
But this is too severe upon him. To wear an iron chain around 
his body, flagellate himself as if he richly deserved every lash, 
and to sleep on a grave, were among his peculiarities. His 
followers were the "Black Friars." Their business was to 
preach in defense of the faith, take care of heretics, and employ 
the Inquisition. These twin orders, confirmed by the pope in 
1 2 16-17, were both mendicant. Save mutual jealousies now 
and then, they went hand in hand for two centuries in resisting 
the attacks made upon them. At first they were in many 
respects reformers. Had they retained their original simplicity 
and earnestness they might have removed great evils and igno- 
rance from the Church. They grew ambitious and cunning. 
They thrust themselves into the professors' chairs at the univer- 
sities, and often eclipsed all other doctors. The intellectual 
young men of the time were disposed to join one of them. 

(1) Eminent Franciscans. Alexander of Hales left his native 
England, came to Paris, and attained a high celebrity as the 
"Irrefragable Doctor." He was the first known monk who 
took a university degree; and he wrote his "Sum of Universal 
Theology," extending the work of Peter Lombard. He was 
the first scholastic who mastered Aristotle in the original, along 
with the Arabian commentaries. Under his training rose Bona- 
ventura of Italy, the "Seraphic Doctor," a man of such ami- 



294 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ability, piety, purity of life, and eloquence that his teacher 
said, "In Bonaventura Adam seems not to have sinned!" But 
this new light built his theology on the doctrine of Original Sin. 
"The soul exiled from God must return to God." His rap- 
turous worship of the Virgin Mary is a blemish on his faith. 
He was like Anselm in his reasoning power, though not so 
forcible ; and like St. Bernard in his practical piety and refor- 
matory spirit. His writings are often mystical. The school- 
men had raised this question, What is the design of God in 
creation — his glory, or the good of his creatures? He said, 
* ' The highest good is in God, who made the universe to dis- 
play and communicate his goodness." When he was asked 
what books he studied, he pointed to the crucifix, and replied. 
"That is the source of all my knowledge — Christ and he 
crucified." He said to a friar: "If God should bestow on one 
only the grace of loving him, that would be a sufficient trea- 
sure. A poor old woman may love him more than the most 
learned doctor of theology." He would have praised the 
woman who was seen in the Crusade of Louis IX, carrying fire 
in one hand to burn paradise and water in the other to quench 
hell, so that men might not serve God from hope of reward or 
fear of punishment, but solely with a love for what he is in 
himself; an idea found in the mediaeval hymns, and later in one 
by Francis Xavier (1552). 

(2) Eminent Dominicans. It was said that God had never 
before divulged so many hidden truths to any of his creatures 
as to Albertus Magnus, the "Universal Doctor." Others said, 
"He has a devil; he is a magician." A Swabian by birth 
(1193), he represents the awakening of intellect in Germany. 
He carried the knowledge which he had received at Paris into 
several German cities, rescued many manuscripts from the dust 
of monasteries, and became the great teacher at Cologne. He 
was the first to reproduce the whole philosophy of Aristotle, 
and adapt it to the theology of the Church. Into his collective 
mind was gathered almost the entire human science of his day. 
He was rich in germs of thought. In twenty-one folios he 
sought to refute all errors, except his own, and expound all 
truths.* 



* He heard the rap of an archbishop at the door of his cell, and answered, 
loudly, " Albert is not here." The caller said, "True enough; he is not here;" 



THOMAS AQUINAS. 295 

But Albert was eclipsed by his pupil, Thomas Aquinas 
(1 225-1 274), who came up from the University of Naples with 
enough of Norse blood in his veins to resist his brothers when 
they wished to force him into military life. He seemed dull, 
unsocial, and given to abstraction. His fellow-students called 
him the dumb ox of Sicily. Albert said, "That dumb ox will 
make the world resound with his doctrine." One of the first 
achievements of Thomas was to roll from his order the reproach 
that it had been foretold by the Abbot Joachim of Calabria as 
not comparable in virtues to the Franciscan. The prophecies, 
or "insights," of this strange and gifted visionary had startled 
kings and popes. By the Babylon at Rome he meant only the 
secular power; her spiritual power was to triumph, but the 
monks were to secure and share it, the Dominicans coming in 
last and receiving the least. * When Thomas lectured at Rome 
and Paris, there was scarcely any hall large enough for the 
crowd of hearers. He traveled and preached. In Italy he 
took pains to preach in the language of the people, so that the 
poorest and most illiterate might be profited. He said that 
devotional exercises were the best preparation for theological 
inquiry. He began every employment with prayer. Albert 
said, ' ' Thomas has put an end to all labor, even unto the 
world's end." Among his folios were his "Catena Aurea, " or 
a commentary compiled from the Fathers on the four Gospels ; 
a commentary on Lombard's Sentences ; a defense of the faith 
against the heathen; and his "Summa Theologian. " This last 
and greatest work became the standard of orthodoxy in the 
Dominican order, and it won him the title of the "Angelic 
Doctor." It made him "the moral master of Christendom for 
three centuries." Its ethical element still ranks him high 
among moralists. At the Council of Trent, nearly three hun- 
dred years after his death, it was placed on the desk beside the 
Holy Scriptures, and it really overshadowed them. Thomas 
was pure scholasticism, clear intellect, and when writing he 
was passionless, usually cold; "he hates nothing, hardly hates 
heresy; loves nothing unless it be naked, abstract truth." Yet 



and went away weeping over Albert's abstraction. Thomas Aquinas had this 
absence of mind, even at the dinner-table of Louis IX, the saint of French 
royalty. 

*On Joachim, see Note IV. 



296 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

there are golden threads of Gospel truth running through this 
marvelous fabric. He was not a man of ice, nor marble. In 
public worship his warm piety showed itself in honest tears. 
When preaching on the love of God and the glory of Christ, 
he looked up, saying, ''More of thee, my Lord, is all I ask." 
In the severity of his thought and the glow of his devotion he 
has been compared to Jonathan Edwards. The errors of the 
one would not have appeared in him had he lived in the times 
of the other ; surely he would not have ' ' gently laid down the 
doctrine of death to heretics." He was the first eminent sup- 
porter of supererogation, the seven virtues, and seven sacra- 
ments.* Luther thought him hardly a Christian; but even 
Puritans have freely acknowledged a debt to him for his 
Augustinianism. He did not shake off the fetters of the 
Mediaeval Church. 

The fame of Thomas and the boast of his order roused the 
jealousy of the Franciscans. At length their man appeared in 
John Duns Scotus (1 274-1 308), whose birthplace is claimed by 
Scotland, England, and Ireland. At Oxford and Paris he be- 
came the "Subtle Doctor," drew a host of disciples, and 
opposed Thomas with negative criticism. Yet he built up a 
system. He protested against the authority of Augustine. He 
was mainly Semi-Pelagian. Thomas had said "God commands 
what is good because it is good;" Scotus said, "The good is 
good because God commands it." He is the pleader for the 
Immaculate Conception, for which he has two hundred argu- 
ments. Three, of any value, would be sufficient. If he died 
at the age of thirty-four, his thirteen folios (his many sermons 
not included) show us, "perhaps, the most wonderful fact in 
the intellectual history of our race." He was a logical machine, 
rolling on and grinding whatever was thrown into it, and giving 
it back in dry syllogisms and barbarous Latin, without a meta- 
phor or glow of poetry. 

Meanwhile strong English sense asserted itself in Roger 
Bacon (12 14-1292), a student at Oxford and Paris, and a Fran- 
ciscan. He learned no little from the Jewish rabbis, whose 
people had liberty in England because they were rich, the 
money -loaners of Europe. On many a cathedral and palace 
they had a mortgage. Bacon courageously rebuked the slavish 

*Note V. 



ROGER BACON. 297 

deference to human authority. How could Augustine and Je- 
rome be trusted dictators when they differed so widely? The 
spell of the Fathers must be shaken off. He ascribed all social 
evils to ignorance of the Bible. "I hear lectures on Lom- 
bard's Sentences; but none on God's Word." He turned from 
the Vulgate to the original Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, and 
urged the laity to study them. He said that all truth must 
come from that central Light which lighteth every man who 
cometh into the world. "All wisdom is contained in Holy 
Scripture ; but it must be explained by means of law and phi- 
losophy. " Law was now the absorbing study in the universi- 
ties, for it led to wealth. He aimed to put philosophy into a 
form more like the natural sciences of our day. This ' ' Won- 
derful Doctor" spent his fortune and the best years of his life 
in trying to restore the Bible to its place, and to make educa- 
cation to consist in a knowledge of facts. He highly valued 
the old Greek philosophers ; but thought that the schoolmen 
had run wild in mere speculations. "Faith first," thought he, 
"and then reason; God's Word, and then his works." The 
more fanatic friars put an end to his lectures, and what they 
called his "magic." He was imprisoned for a time. Pope 
Clement IV wished to see his books, but he had yet written 
nothing. In fifteen months he wrote the three books of his 
"Opus Majus." The next pope cared less for science; and 
Bacon lay ten years in a prison, and was free again only the 
last year of his life. Long before that he had said, ' ' I am 
unheard, forgotten, buried." It is a noble thing for a man 
truly to live in advance of his age, and to sow the seeds of 
measureless harvests for later times. His philosophic spirit re- 
appeared, three hundred and fifty years later, in Lord Francis 
Bacon (1 561-1626), the Chancellor of England until he con- 
fessed, "I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all de- 
fense;" but whose fall did not overthrow his " Instauratio 
Magna," by .which he hoped to inaugurate a new method of 
studying the sciences, by an induction of facts and principles. 
"There can scarcely be a reasonable doubt that, by his writ- 
ings and influence, he has contributed far more than any other 
philosopher to pave the way for that wonderful 'advancement 
of the sciences ' which forms the peculiar distinction and glory 
of modern philosophy." The "Opus Majus" of the first 



298 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Bacon seems to have been the prototype of the ''Novum Or- 
ganum," written by his namesake. 

III. The period of decline in scholasticism. The Thomists 
and the Scotists, with their two theologies, rule the schools, 
and indulge in destructive quarrels. William Occam (1270- 
1347), an Oxford man, a lecturer on the Continent, opposed 
the Scotists of his own Franciscan order, and the general 
method of scholastic reasoning. "He was an able and sensi- 
ble man," said Luther. He taught that the foundation of 
morality, or right, is not utility, but the will of God. He 
refuted the theory of papal infallibility. His strong English 
sense will appear in Grossetete and Bradwardine, the forerun- 
ners of Wyclif. By degrees the schoolmen gave way to the 
scholars. The causes of the decline of scholasticism were, 
self-exhaustion, the reformatory movements, the restoration of 
the Bible, and the Renaissance. We are glad that there did 
come an end to a system which raised so many questions, but 
answered so few, and stirred so much thought, but contributed 
so little to faith, spirituality, and scientific progress. It shows 
what the human mind can attempt, and what it can not do. 
The old lumbering coach has gone from the highways of mental 
travel. We think more rapidly, but are in more danger of 
collisions ; and some of the guards and brakes which render us 
safer came from the scholastic theology and philosophy. It 
gave us order of thought, terms and definitions, modes of treat- 
ing errors and stating truths, which are not easily displaced. 



NOTES. 

I. The Crusades. 1st. Already noticed (1095-99). 2d. This was caused 
by the fall of Edessa, and preached by St. Bernard (1147-49). Three hun- 
dred thousand men failed to take Damascus. 3d. Saladin took Jerusalem. 
The only city left to the European Christians was Tyre. The Crusade was 
undertaken by Richard I of England, Philip Augustus of France, and 
Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, who died in Cilicia. Acre was taken. 
Philip retired. Richard made a favorable peace with Saladin (1189-92). 
Several crusades were failures, and were directed against other countries. 
In the fifth Baldwin and other knights took Constantinople, and founded a 
Latin kingdom, which lasted about fifty-seven years (1204-61). In the sixth, 
part of Egypt and Palestine were seized — Jerusalem regained (1210-29). 
The eighth was undertaken by St. Louis IX, of France (1245-50). Louis 
died in the ninth (1270). The foreign crusading spirit was now exhausted. 



NOTES TO CHAPTER XIII. 299 

II. Scholastic Terms. "Nominalism {nomen, a name) is the doctrine 
that general notions, such as the notion of a tree, have no realities corre- 
sponding to them, and have no existence but as names or words. The 
doctrine directly opposed to it is realism. The intermedial doctrine is 
conceptualism. Realism is the doctrine that genus and species (universals) 
are real things /' e. g., humanity, man, virtue. Fleming. 

III. Schoolmen, besides those named in the text. Rupert of Deutz 
(1135) insisted on Biblical study, and in his commentaries broached the 
doctrine of consubstantiation. Herveus set forth quite clearly justification 
by faith (1130). Peter Cantor, in his Summa, held that the Bible was the 
true source of theology. Nicolas de Lyra (1340) was the chief commentator 
of his age. Of him it was said: "If Lyra had not played the lyre, Luther 
would not have danced." Gabriel Biel (1495), a noted preacher at Tubingen, 
is called the last of the Scholastics. Raymund of Sabunde, professor at 
Toulouse (1430), is called "the founder of natural theology." 

IV. Abbot Joachim (1200), a modest, pious visionary, grieved over the 
corruptions of the Church, studied the Apocalypse, and broached wild theo- 
ries. He persuaded the emperor, Henry VI, to listen to his expositions of 
Jeremiah, and refrain from his ravages in Italy. His scheme of the Trinity 
and prophecy included three general states of government : (1) That of the 
Father, of the Old Testament, of the divine power, of human slavery, and 
of marriage. (2) That of the Son, the New Testament, the divine wisdom, 
filial service, and the clergy. (3) That of the Holy Ghost, the spirit of the 
Old and New Testaments, the divine love, friendship, and freedom, the 
monks, hermits, and contemplatives. The ages of the Christian Church are 
those of Peter, or faith; Paul, or knowledge; John, or love. In 1260 the 
world would greatly change; Antichrist would come. ("He must be pope 
Clement then," said Richard of England.) Antichrist would come from the 
Patarini, or opponents of the clergy, in Lombardy ; help destroy the evils 
in the Church, and fall before the purified and victorious papacy. In this 
new state the Holy Spirit would dispense with the clergy. Joachim was 
condemned at Rome for tritheism. Dante placed his name in Paradise. 
This "prophetic spirit" had already been manifested in St. Elizabeth of 
Hungary (11 50), who cried out against clerical vices. The story of St. Ursula 
and the eleven thousand virgins slain at Cologne rests on her visions. St. 
Hildegard, of Bingen on the Rhine, was thought to be an inspired nun even 
by St. Bernard. It was easy for all these fanatics to surmise that the sins 
of the age would provoke a reaction in the Church, and apply to them some 
garbled verses of the Apocalypse. 

V. The Seven Sacraments of the Roman Church are Baptism, Con- 
firmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Ordination, and 
Matrimony. Actual sins were divided into venial, which do not destroy 
sanctifying grace, and mortal, which destroy it, they being willful and delib- 
erate. "No number of venial sins can make one mortal sin." 

VI. Arnold of Brescia (1100-55), a preaching monk, a disciple of 
Abelard, and opponent of St. Bernard in doctrine and of the Hildebrandine 



3oo 



HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



polity, represents the spirit of insurrection in Northern Italy. He employed 
his eloquence against the papal system of government. He would reduce 
the clergy to primitive simplicity by having each State confiscate their 
property, and introduce the voluntary method of support. Even the pope 
should come to the same level. He helped Brescia to declare itself a repub- 
lic. This free spirit extended widely. Pope Innocent II secured his ban- 
ishment. After hovering some years about Zurich, he suddenly appeared 
at Rome to help it towards republicanism. The senate informed Pope 
Lucius that it would submit to his spiritual rule, but not to his temporal 
power. Arnold's republic lasted about eight years, civil war generally pre- 
vailing. Hadrian IV (the English Breakspeare) and the nobles banished 
Arnold, and put Rome under interdict, thus depriving it of all religious 
services. The people repented. Papal religion triumphed over liberty. 
Arnold was ordered into exile, but Frederic Barbarossa, coming to Rome to 
be crowned, seized him, secured his excommunication from the Church, and 
he was put to death ( 1 1 55) as a heretic and a rebel. His name was not 
forgotten, and the term "Arnoldists " was applied to lovers of liberty in 
Italy and northward. Probably the Arnoldists of Cologne were so named 
from a Catharist leader there ; and those among the Albigenses were follow- 
ers of Arnold Hott. 






DISSENT FROM ROME. 30 1 



Chapter XIV. 

DISSENT FROM ROME. 

1085-1380. 

We have seen the Western Church rising towards her high- 
est power in the papacy, in theology, in ritualism, and in the 
monastic orders. One thing only remained; that was the entire 
conformity of the people to her papal law, her scholastic theol- 
ogy, her sacraments, her worship, her imposed rites, her mode 
of government. But this was never fully attained. The effort 
to enforce the papal authority and dogmas provoked a resist- 
ance which was not always socially or politically organized. 
Hence various forms of dissent appeared. In nearly all Europe 
there were groups of people who were not in harmony with the 
Church, and dissenters of a bold type arose. In the formation 
of these groups four things are doubtless true: (1) That such 
sects as the Bogomiles and Cathari held many Gnostic and 
Montanistic errors, and not enough Christianity to warrant the 
keeping of their names on the Church register. (2) That their 
names were freely applied to many people who were almost as 
ignorant, but yet more Christian in their beliefs and lives; and 
as zealous in opposing the ecclesiasticism of the times. (3) That 
certain districts, especially the mountainous, became refuges 
and homes of all sorts of dissenters. (4) That new leaders often 
left their names upon their followers. The leaders might be 
wild zealots for error, or excommunicated priests, or honest 
readers of the Bible who saw more clearly the defects of the 
Church than the remedy for them, or whose spiritual needs 
were not met by the Church. The followers might be errorists, 
freethinkers, malcontents, ignorant rustics, and villagers, who 
eagerly adopted some of the novel doctrines and produced new 
combinations of opinion. Thus, before the true reformers, and 
separate from the Waldenses, appeared numerous sects, old and 
new, modified and variable, flocks without folds, communities 



302 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

without creeds, and bands of men in revolt against Church 
and state. In regard to these sects, * history must have its 
theories. They were not willing to be the serfs of the Roman 
Church. We turn to other forms of dissent. 

I. The Albigenses. 

We can simply give our own view of them. This name 
covers, not a sect, but the people of the mountainous district 
of Albi (now Tarn), in Southern France. But their peculiar 
religious opinions were rooted in the whole country on both 
sides of the Pyrenees, from Beziers to Bordeaux, and especially 
at Toulouse, the old capital of the Arian Goths, where heresy 
had ever since lingered, f Various small sects, from the better 
Paulicians to the grossest Cathari, had grown up or gathered in 
that region. Among the crude beliefs were a few live coals of 
the Christian faith. When these were fanned and fed by new 
teachers, more vigorous types of doctrine appeared, in opposition 
to both high-churchism andCatharism: I. The Pctrobrnssians, 
or followers of Peter de Bruys, who had been a priest in Dau- 
phiny and suspended. He went from Aries about 1 104, teach- 
ing through the valleys as far as the heart of Gascony. There 
he ' ' no longer whispered in hamlets, but openly preached in 
the towns." At Toulouse his success was astonishing. He 
probably assailed the visible Church, as he saw it, and insisted 
that the Church was in the hearts of believers, and that God 
did not need the chapels, nor require loud singing and noisy 
preaching. He used the wooden crosses along the roads to 
burn at his tent, or make bonfires in the villages. Peter the 
Venerable, who visited that whole country, urged that mild 
measures be tried first upon the swarms of heretics. He re- 
ported that their leader held these views: (1) That persons 
ought not to be baptized till they come to the use of reason. 
(2) That it is not proper to build churches, and that such as 
are built should be pulled down. (3) That the holy crosses 
should be destroyed. (4) That the body and blood of Christ are 



*Note I. 

t" Oh how difficult it is to pluck up a deep-rooted custom! This treacher- 
ous city of Toulouse, from its very foundation, as is said, hath seldom or never 
been clear of this detestable plague, this poison of heretical pravity." (Peter 
de Vaux Cernay, about A. D. 1215. 



THE ALBIGENSES— THE HENRICIANS. 303 

not distributed in the sacred supper, but only the signs of them. 
(5) That the oblations, prayers, and good works of the living 
do not profit the dead. Perhaps De Bruys denied the validity 
of baptism by the dominant clergy, whether the subjects were 
infants or adults, and rebaptized those who avowed a personal 
faith in Christ. Probably he would have been glad to see 
churches built, or spared, for the use of himself and his follow- 
ers. The most that can be inferred from the scanty facts, is 
that he aimed to set forth the central truth of Christianity, 
point men to the true cross, and elevate the morals of an 
ignorant people. In 11 24, he was burnt by a mob at St. Gilles, 
in Languedoc. 

2. The Henricians. Henry of Lausanne appears to have 
been a Swiss, a monk at Cluny, and then one of the regular 
clergy. About 1 116 he was an unlearned, ascetic, barefoot, fine- 
looking, enthusiastic, and immensely popular preacher in the 
diocese of Le Mans, whose kindly bishop was Hildebert (later 
of Tours), known to us by his compend of systematic theology. 
During the bishop's absence at Rome Henry's rude eloquence 
and spirit of reform were sweeping the whole country. He 
unmasked the vicious clergy and inflamed the populace against 
them; denounced all forced or pretended celibacy; reclaimed 
abandoned women, and induced even young nobles to clothe 
decently these wretches, and wed some of them, in the face of 
day; and set at naught the ritualism of the Church. The 
bishop, on his return, found the clergy in alarm, and heard 
the people say to him, "We have now a father, bishop, and 
advocate far above thee in wisdom, worship, and sanctity." 
In public he asked Henry to recite the morning hymn, or mat- 
ins. The preacher either could not, or would not, repeat it. 
He was thus proved to be too ignorant for the guidance of the 
illiterates who fancied that they represented intelligent au- 
diences. The bishop was too good to burn him, but severe 
enough to expel him from the diocese. 

Henry went south, became an associate, if not a disciple, 
of Peter de Bruys, and proclaimed similar doctrines, though 
with less fierceness against crosses, hymns, loud preaching in 
the woods, and forbidden churches in the towns. The flames 
of St. Gilles sent him wandering again. Arrested at Aries, he 
was a prisoner of Innocent II (1130-43), then in exile at Pisa, 



304 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

but Bernard's pope was content to place him in Bernard's care. 
He was soon earnestly at work in Languedoc, protected by one 
of the chief nobles, and the country seemed to be as full of 
heresy as ever. St. Bernard tried to quiet him, and said, that 
after Henry was again in his mountain haunts, he drew such 
crowds to hear his tremendously loud preaching, ' ' which would 
melt a stone," as to cause the churches to be left without peo- 
ple, the people without priests, the priests without due respect, 
the Christians without Christ, the sacraments no longer hon- 
ored, the holy days without solemnities. Pope Eugenius III 
(1145-53) sen t thither Cardinal Alberic, who was insulted at 
Albi, and five days later came St. Bernard, to whom the pope 
had written, " Heresy is a foe that can be overthrown only by 
the conqueror of Abelard. " The great monk, fresh from 
preaching the second crusade, was soon hailed with enthusi- 
asm, for he was a zealous man, almost able to convince people 
against their will, and disposed to persuade rather than to per- 
secute. The church would not hold the multitude to whom 
he showed that sectaries were the little foxes that spoil the 
vines. He may have repeated what he had said concerning 
the sects at Cologne: "Take the foxes, not with arms but ar- 
guments ; recall them to the true faith ; reconcile them to the 
Church, if possible ; teach them to say, ' Take us the foxes 
that destroy thy vines!'" He is said to have performed some 
miracles. It is more certain that when he asked all who pre- 
ferred the Catholic faith to heresy to hold up their hands, every 
hand in the vast assembly was raised. Henry had taken refuge 
with the barons, who hated the Church clergy, and many of 
them ranked with the heretics. He was secured by the cardi- 
nal, and given over in chains to the Bishop of Toulouse — 
Bernard assenting — and he probably died in prison (1148). It 
is said that at another town Bernard entered the church and 
began to preach, but the people left it in disgust. He followed 
after them, preaching through the streets. They shouted verses 
of Scripture at him, and he turned into the high-road, leaving 
his anathema upon the town. 

3. The Good- Men (Bons Homines) were so numerous in the 
county of Toulouse, in 11 78, that more repressive measures 
were taken. They would not go to hear the cardinal legate, 
nor confess their errors to him. They called him an "apostate, 



PIERRE MAURAN. 305 

heretic, hypocrite. " He secured a list of names, and chief among 
them was that of Pierre Mauran, a layman and reported leader, 
aged, highly respected, and wealthy, having two large houses 
in which the meetings of the dissenters were held by night. One 
house was in Toulouse, the other in the country. In these he 
often preached to large audiences. When arraigned, he de- 
clared himself a true catholic, using that word in its original 
and proper sense. At first neither threats nor persuasions 
moved him. He finally promised to answer, on oath, all ques- 
tions upon the articles of faith. The inquisitors asked him his 
belief concerning "the Sacrament of the Altar." He replied, 
"The bread after consecration still remains bread." This one 
answer was enough ; the penalties were declared. He entreated 
for pardon. They gave him both pardon and punishment, for 
they spared his soul and seized all his property ; ordered him 
to leave on a crusade for Jerusalem within forty days ; be there 
for three years, serving the poor: if he then returned, they 
would give him back his property, except the houses, which 
were to be razed to the ground, because of the heretical meet- 
ings which had been held in them; and further, he must at 
once be flogged on his naked shoulders, while making peniten- 
tial visits to the churches of Toulouse, and pay van'ous fines 
and fictitious damages. This was the papal method of pardon ! 
In this case, we see an advance of those processes which 
resulted in the Inquisition, for it was the outgrowth of a policy 
intended to uphold the faith and the clergy of the Church, 
rather than the invention of a single mind. Various councils 
in the twelfth century grew more inquisitorial, and the custom 
of burning heretics alive was matured.* "In this year (1183) 
many heretics were burnt alive in Flanders." That same year 



* St. Bernard was not quite alone in protesting against it. Eager as Henry 
II, of England, was to prevent Becket's party from charging him with leniency 
to heresy, he would not allow the Publicani at Oxford, about 1160, to be put 
to death. (See Note I, 3.) His dominions included all the west part of the 
present France, and the sectaries were very numerous in Gascony and Guyenne. 
"More than a thousand towns full of them," and no king to burn them! The 
Abbess St. Hildegard, an oracle along the Rhine (1180), urged that heretics 
be deprived of almost every thing save life, but "do not kill them, as they are 
God's' image." Peter Cantor, of Paris (1190), condemned the execution of her- 
etics, and the use of ordeals for trying them. He was bold enough to publish 
that the Word of God contains all that is necessary for salvation. 

20 



306 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Pope Lucius III gave instructions which foreshadowed the In- 
quisition. One of the heresies of the time was the republican- 
ism of the Italian cities ; it had been kindled in Rome by Arnold 
of Brescia* (hanged and burnt, 1155)1 an d it drove Lucius from 
the holy city, a wanderer in towns and refugee in castles, vainly 
hoping for restoration by the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, 
"the Xerxes of the Middle Ages." The pope relieved his own 
mind by issuing curses upon all unlicensed preachers, and all 
who differed from the Roman Church in doctrine or practice. 
Even the friends of dissenters were put under malediction. 
"All the abettors of heretics shall be branded with perpetual 
infamy, and excluded from being advocates or witnesses, and 
from discharging any public offices." After the Church had 
done her worst, the heretic and his friend were to be delivered 
over to the secular arm for complete punishment. The want 
of an organized agency to do the work of both Church and 
state, secretly and effectively, was supplied by the Inquisition, 
which soon found victims among the dissenters at Toulouse. 

4. Among the purer Albigenses were the Amoldists, prob- 
ably named from Arnold Hott. In a public discussion at Mont- 
real, 1206, he maintained doctrines like those of the Henricians. 

It was a time when French history is monotonous with 
immoralities. The reforms of Abbe Suger, the statesman 
(1122-52), were not lasting. The public morals were not im- 
proved by Philip II, nor by the papal interdict laid upon all 
France, in 1200, for his sins.f The people had no religious 
privileges for eight months. The entire dissenting movement 
in Southern France had not the positive elements of a reform ; 
but was there any thing better in papal interdicts ? Surely the 
defects of the Albigenses make a poor excuse for the destruc- 
tion of that people. Van Laun says that their country "did 
not escape the general contagion of immorality ; but we can at 
least claim that it was less corrupt than the rest of France. 
The troubadours refined and attenuated vice ; they covered it 



* Note VI to Chapter XIII. 

t Interdict, a papal mode of excommunicating a town, or even a kingdom, 
until it should submit to certain terms. While under this ban public worship 
was suspended, the churches were closed, and often the priests must not officiate 
at funerals. If marriages were allowed they must be celebrated in a grave-yard. 
This was one of the terrible engines of the papacy to secure its supremacy. 



INNOCENT III. 307 

with a delicate fretwork of etiquette; but they repudiated bru- 
tality. . . . The evils of vice, as of war, singed but did 
not blacken them." Both troubadour and Henrician, so free, 
so outspoken against all tyranny, so keen in satire of the 
papalized clergy and monks, found protectors in the no- 
bles. Nearly all the southern barons gave kindly shelter to 
the gay singers and the bold preachers. A sad doom awaited 
them all. 

Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) represents an epoch in 
which unusual efforts were made to exterminate dissent, exalt 
the papacy, and subject the European nations to Rome. One 
who knew him described him as a man of clear intellect and 
varied learning ; a fine talker among lawyers ; ' ' sang songs and 
psalms well ; preserved the mean between prodigality and 
avarice ; liberal to the really needy ; severe towards the rebell- 
ious and contumacious ; brave, magnanimous, and astute ; a 
defender of the faith, an assailant of heresy ; in justice rigid, 
in mercy pious ; somewhat quick in anger, but ready in for- 
giveness." This artificial eulogy is marred by Matthew Paris, 
who knew England's oppressors, and wrote that Innocent was 
"beyond all other men ambitious and proud, an insatiable 
thirster after money, ready and apt to commit any crime for a 
reward?" Most certainly his zeal against heresy was intense. 
Bands of dissenters in the remotest corners were sure to be 
found. Religious persecution assumed new forms. The Age 
of Innocent was one of terror to all liberty of thought and 
worship ; he lived to assert that the papacy was the sun, 
and national kingship was the moon, to the whole system 
of affairs on earth. He was Hildebrand intensified. Outside 
of Germany the chief planet that did not revolve properly 
about him was Toulouse, with its secular Count Raymond and 
his religious subjects, the Albigenses, who were accused of 
being gross Manicheans. He could enjoy the songs of Ray- 
mond's merry troubadours, but the hymns of Albi's heretics 
must cease. The famous Dominic and his Spanish band were 
preaching with zeal, and trying to charm people by their 
signs of poverty, but with slow gains. "Words avail nothing." 
Bishop Fulco, once a famous troubadour, grew fierce against 
heresy, when he saw that one count had a Waldensian wife, 
two sisters of like faith, and nobles to sympathize with him in 



308 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

his detestation of the clergy. Count Raymond was lax in 
morals. When he and his nobles read the pope's letter requir- 
ing them to persecute the heretics, their reply was, ' ' We have 
always lived with them, and we know that they are honest 
neighbors." Peter, of Castelnau, the learned papal legate 
(1204), labored four years # to get all the machinery in order, and 
excommunicated Raymond for his want of exterminating zeal. 
The legate was stabbed by a stranger and died, saying, * ' God 
forgive thee, as I forgive thee." Raymond was charged (doubt- 
less wrongly) with the murder, and it finally cost him his pos- 
sessions. It served as a pretext to series of atrocious crusades, 
extending through thirty years. Heaven was promised to all 
who should fall in the wars upon the Albigenses. The enter- 
prise was thought to be all the more meritorious, as the heretic 
Raymond was in worse spiritual condition than the Saracen 
infidels.* 

Simon de Montfort led the crusading army. The poor 
people — Petrobrussians, Henricians, and Albigensians of all 
sorts — fled in droves to the stronger towns. The siege of Be- 
ziers, in 1209, was one of the most horrible. The walls were 
broken through, and the soldiers began their work. An officer 
asked Arnold, the abbot of Citeaux and papal legate, "How 
shall we know Catholics from heretics?" The reply was, "Slay 
them all; the Lord knoweth them that are his!" Not a living 
soul was spared. The bells of the cathedral rang till the mas- 
sacre of twenty thousand people or more was ended, and the 
pillage completed. Then the city was reduced to ashes. Thus 
went on the war. New armies of one hundred thousand men 
marched into it. King Louis VIII led into it, perhaps, twice that 
number. "The swarming misbelievers of Provence were almost 
literally drowned in blood." The younger Count Raymond, 
forced for a time into the crusade, was reduced to a private 
citizen, and that by a Lateran Council which made Montfort 
the sovereign of nearly all the counties he had conquered. 
This was the way the papal sun gave its light and attraction to 
France. Both troubadour and heretic should breathe no more 
in her dominions. The ethics of a synod were, "We are not 

*" Innocent III was the soul of this war, Dominic was its apostle, Count 
Raymond the victim, and Simon, Earl of Montfort, the military chief." 
(Henault.) 



PETER WALDO. 309 

to keep faith with those who do not keep faith with God.* 
Heresy is the murder of the soul." Those who escaped the 
crusader were more secretly destroyed by the Inquisition, 
now quite nearly perfected by St. Dominic. It was perma- 
nently established by the Council of Toulouse in 1229, as "the 
Tribunal for noting and exterminating all kinds of heretical 
pravity." No legalized institution has ever done more to crush 
intellectual and religious liberty, or added more to the un- 
spoken miseries of the human race. Every layman daring to 
possess a Bible, now first forbidden to the laity by this Council, 
was in peril of the rack, the dungeon, and the stake. The his- 
tory of the Church in Spain, for six hundred and fifty years, is 
mainly that of the Inquisition and its destruction of human life. 
A more sensible measure against heresy was the founding 
of the University of Toulouse, 1229, but the pope forbade the 
students to use the Romance language, for it was identified with 
heretical opinions. Thus he contributed to the decline of the 
literature of the troubadours, and the prevention of dissent. 
Romanism could not trust the native speech of the people. 

II. Peter Waldo and Poor- Men of Lyons. 

Peter Waldo (de Vaud), a rich merchant of Lyons, saw one 
of his fellow-citizens fall dead at an entertainment. Under 
serious impressions he wished to understand the Gospels which 
he had been accustomed to hear read in the Latin services 
of the Church. He employed two men to translate portions 
of the Bible, and extracts from the Fathers, into the popular 
language (1160), thus forming a little book for the people. 

*The rules collected and sanctioned by Pope Gregory XIII (1578), permit 
all sorts of persons, even the most infamous, to testify against the accused. 
" Heretics, too, may give evidence, but only against the culprit is it valid, never 
in his favor. This provision is most prudent, nay most just ; for, since the her- 
etic has broken faith towards his God, no one ought to take his word. . . . 
The criminal must not see the witnesses, nor know who they are." Other rules 
amount to this: Deceive the accused; make him think that you know all about 
his errors ; draw him into confidential disclosures or utterances prompted by hopes 
and fears; repeatedly examine him so that he may contradict himself; "when 
his answers are confused, the doctors agree that you may put him to the torture. 
This method is almost sure to succeed ; and he must be clever indeed who does 
not fall into the snare. . . . As it is lawful to extort the truth by torture, it 
must be lawful, a fortiori, to do it by dissimulation (verbis Jictis) . . . . All the 
laws agree that a heretic has no right to appeal." 



3IO HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Copies were made and circulated. He gave much of his 
wealth to the poor, and himself to the work of his Lord. He 
began his lay-preaching in the streets of Lyons and in the 
neighboring villages. He had no aim to separate from the 
Church, but to revive and restore apostolic purity, piety, genial 
society, good order, and the rights of the people. Laymen of 
kindred spirit joined him.* They were the public Bible readers, 
men and women of that age. They met a popular want among 
the hungry multitudes, for, after all, the people were better at 
heart than the priests. They went out two by two, without 
pilgrim's staff or monk's wallet, and they won the names of 
Humiliati, Poor-men, Leonists, Sandal-wearers. They drew 
much people after them. They knew how to impart their 
Scriptural knowledge, and it grew richer and deeper. 

The clergy were angry at the exposures of their own igno- 
rance, idleness, and immorality. They had lost the spirit of 
Irenseus and Agobard. The archbishop, neither teaching the 
Bible nor willing that others should do it, excommunicated 
these new teachers, and expelled them from his diocese. Peter 
appealed to Rome, and sent two men to lay specimens of their 
translations before Pope Alexander III (i 179), and ask his 
sanction upon their labors. Walter Mapes, of Oxford, was 
appointed one of a committee to examine these versions. He 
says the examiners laughed merrily over the simplicity and the 
lack of technical terms displayed by men who knew more of 
Christianity than of scholastic theology, more of true faith and 
hearty love than of mechanical logic. The pope did not give 
his sanction, for this would offend the clergy ; and yet the Late- 
ran Council, then sitting, did not place these Poor-men of 
Lyons among the heretics whom they were busily condemning. 
Five years later Pope Lucius put them under anathema, not so 
much for heresy as for irregularity as lay-teachers. Waldo 
was driven forth as a wanderer in France, Italy, and Bohemia, 
where he died (1197). His followers were widely scattered, 
northward up the Rhine, westward through France and across 
the Pyrenees, and eastward as far as Prague. In 12 10 Inno- 
cent III invited them to reunite with the Church, but they 
went on independent and earnest in their work. They became 
allied to the Waldenses, and in certain countries of the South 

• Note II. 



THE WALDENSES. 311 

they had more schools than the Catholics. Their preachers 
held public debates with the Roman clergy. But their forces 
were not unified, and they gradually disappeared or were ab- 
sorbed in other dissenting bodies. 

III. The Waldenses. 

These were at first not a sect, but the Christians of the val- 
leys, the Walds of Piedmont.* They appear as a united body, 
separate from the general Church, as early as 1 198, when 
James, Bishop of Turin, employed forcible measures against 
them. Volumes have been written upon their antiquity. 
Whether or not their ''Noble Lesson" carries in one of its 
lines the date of 1100, they seem to be a distinct people from 
the Albigenses and from Peter Waldo and his followers. We 
should be happy to find the clear proofs of " their unbroken 
succession as an organized Church backwards from the twelfth 
century to the comparatively purer Church of the early ages ;" 
not for the sake of any theory about ecclesiastical succession, 
but for the historical facts. Many of their later writers and 
advocates claim Vigilantius, Ambrose of Milan, and Claudius 
of Turin, as representing their spiritual fathers. When perse- 
cution brought them to the light of the world, they had the 
Bible, loved it, and studied it; they had lay-teachers, and or- 
dained presbyters ; they had no prelatic bishops ; they had 
quite a definite creed expressed in Scriptural terms ; they were 
strongly opposed to the entire system of Rome ; they declared 
the pope to be Antichrist, and the Church ritual to be folly; 
they refused confession to priests, penances, the abuses con- 
nected with the only two divine sacraments, and nearly all the 
Roman rites ; and it is hardly too much to say, ' ' that no can- 
did reader of the creeds, confessions, and other public docu- 
ments which they have left, can hesitate to conclude that their 
leading opinions were very nearly the same with those which 
were afterwards entertained by Luther, Calvin, and other Re- 
formers, so that they fell in very readily with the Church of 
Geneva in the sixteenth century." 

The Reformers found them to be in little need of a 
reformation. Ten years before Luther's voice was clearly 

*Vallis, Val, gives Vallenses ; its plural Vaux, gives Vandois ; the German 



312 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

heard, they sent a defense to Ladislaus, King of Bohemia 
(1508), repelling various calumnies; this one, among others, 
that they denied infant baptism. "True it is," say they, 
"that being for some hundreds of years constrained to suffer 
our children to be baptized by the Roman priests, we de- 
ferred the doing of it as long as possible, because we detested 
the human inventions annexed to the institution of that holy 
sacrament, which we looked upon as pollutions of it. And by 
reason that our pastors, whom we call barbes, are often in 
travels abroad for the service of the Church, we could not have 
baptism administered to our children by our own ministers ; we 
therefore sometimes kept them long without baptism, upon 
which delay the priests have charged us with that reproach." 

They may have had no versions of the Bible in their Ro- 
maunt language before Peter Waldo's little book appeared, but 
they kept its truths in their own vernacular. Their barbes 
(uncles, pastors) were trained by committing to memory the 
Holy Scriptures in times of rest from toil. They had no lib- 
eral arts, no classical studies ; all they knew came from the 
Bible and their common sense. Their quiet, modest manners, 
and their strict morality, drew praise from their enemies. They 
were zealous teachers. A poor Waldensian used to swim across 
a river in wintery nights, to reach a Roman Catholic whom he 
wished to convert. Of course, they sometimes blundered in 
their interpretation of Scripture, but surely not worse than the 
priests. They went abroad as peddlers, and employed ingen- 
ious methods to introduce their doctrines, or copies of Scrip- 
tural books, as the best of jewels. Bands of them seem to 
have roamed widely through Europe ; and, after persecution led 
some of them to colonize in various lands, it is said that a 
traveler from Antwerp to Florence could lodge every night 
with some Waldensian brother or sympathizer. 

The first combined force brought against them was in 1209, 
when they were between the fires of Rome and Germany. But 
as neither pope nor emperor wanted a desolating crusade so 
near at hand, to give one an advantage over the other, they 
were not so inhumanly butchered at once as were the Albi- 
genses. The wars upon them were local, and of long duration ; 
the massacres ran on in woeful monotony; but nowhere was 
heroism more brilliant, nor patience more saintly. In 1472 



BIBLE READERS AT METZ. 313 

Yolande, the sister of Louis XI, began that long warfare upon 
them waged by the dukes of Savoy. Inquisitors had been at 
work for two centuries with all their horrid enginery; and still 
five hundred pastors and elders could hold synods in the Valley 
of Angrogna. The Vaudois made the best weapons and armor 
they could. When driven to the heights of San Giovanni, the 
brave men and their families, behind the rocks, prayed, ' ' O 
Lord, help us, save us!" They were heard by the Black 
Mondovi, as he clambered the high Alp, step by step, and he 
shouted, with a laugh : ' ' My fellows are coming to answer your 
prayers. You shall be saved with a vengeance." Young Peter 
Revel let fly an arrow, which sent this new Goliath reeling 
down the ledge, dead at the feet of his followers. They fled, 
panic-stricken, and the Waldenses rolled rocks after them, to 
the utter dismay of the enemy. Their prayer was answered. 
After similar defeats the duke withdrew his troops, sent home 
the papal legate, and met representatives of the Vaudois 
Churches at Pignerol. The duke looked carefully at their 
children. "Is it possible that these are the children of the 
heretics?" he exclaimed; for priests had said they were born 
with black throats and goat's feet. "How charming they are! 
The prettiest I ever saw!" His heart was mellowed. His 
treaty of peace closed the first military persecution of the men 
in that valley. But in 1488 the whole population of Val 
Louise was slaughtered. Other French valleys were harried 
for ten years more, when Louis XII came into power. He 
thought it wise to send commissioners to learn what these 
people did believe and practice. They visited the hamlets and 
towns. At an inn one of them said, "Would to God that I 
were as good a Christian as the worst of these people!" The 
Bishop of Embrun heard it, and opposed peace, saying, "The 
commissioners praise the heretics." But Louis gave ear to 
their report, and said, "They are, indeed, better men than we 
are." The Waldensians were spared. It was this king who 
struck the medal, Perdam Babilonis nomen — I will destroy Bab- 
ylon. And Rome has not yet canonized him ! 

IV. The Bible Readers at Metz. 

It was an age when the Word of God was generally neg- 
lected. The men who knew most of it complained that it was 



314 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

comparatively thrust into the background. It was rarely trans- 
lated. But wherever parts of it were rendered into popular 
language we see a people rejoicing in the light. A striking 
instance is found at Metz, on the Moselle. Some Poor-men 
of Lyons, or Waldenses, brought there certain books of the 
Bible in the French language. Men and women eagerly read 
them. They formed Bible-reading societies; these may be the 
schools of which more than forty are reported at Metz and 
other cities on the German side of the Rhine. The priests 
tried to stop their meetings ; but the members said, ' ' God meant 
his Word for the people of every class. These books teach us 
far more than you ever do. We can not give them up." The 
bishop reported them to the pope ; but Innocent III was well 
aware that the study of Holy Scripture by the laity was neither 
wrong nor injurious. He replied (1199), in substance: "The 
desire to know the Word of God is praiseworthy, for this Word 
is the food and medicine of the soul. I am rejoiced, as well as 
surprised, to learn that the Bible has found its way among the 
laity, and that it nourishes their piety ; provided that the order 
of the Church is not disturbed. I suppose that few can elevate 
themselves to this lofty stage ; most people must be content 
with union to Christ by means of visible things, such as the 
eucharist." To the bishop he wrote: "While you show no 
tolerance of heresy, be careful not to injure a pious simplicity, 
lest the simple become heretics. Be extremely cautious lest, 
in rooting up tares, you destroy the wheat." To the people 
he said: "It is not proper for you to hold your meetings in 
private, nor to act as preachers, nor to ridicule the priests. 
Remember that men must have a special training before they 
can understand the deep things of Holy Scripture. The priests 
are trained for this purpose. Listen to them. Respect even 
the most ignorant of them. Beware of thinking that you alone 
are correct, and despising those who do not join you." Then 
he threatened them with severity if they did not heed his pa- 
ternal advice. Thus he laid down the doctrine which Roman- 
ists have ever since taught — It is very well for you to know the 
Bible, but your priest must teach it to you in what manner and 
measure he pleases ! The priests were in the way of popular 
knowledge. 

The result was that Cistercian abbots were sent to Metz to 



RAYMOND PALMARIS. 315 

suppress this Bible-reading. The truth-seeking laymen, in their 
" pious simplicity" had found out too many priestly errors for 
the comfort of the priests. They persisted in holding their 
meetings. They refused to give up their books, or to obey the 
pope's orders. They were called Waldensians, as if that were 
a hard name. Force was applied to them. They were routed ; 
their versions were burnt, so far as possible; their opinions 
rooted out. The priests of Metz breathed freely again, and 
went on in their old ways of ignorance, idleness, and vicious 
selfishness. Like cases seem to have occurred at Auxerre, and 
various towns in France, until the Council of Toulouse, in 
1229, forbade the laity to possess the books of the Old and 
New Testaments in any language, and even popular versions 
of the Psalter, the Breviary, and the Hours of the Blessed 
Mary. Special condemnation was hurled at the Scriptures sent 
forth by Peter Waldo, in the Romance tongue ; these must be 
burnt. In 1246, at Beziers, the old Albigensian town, laymen 
were forbidden to have any theological books, even in Latin, 
while clergy and laity were alike forbidden to have them in 
their mother - tongue ! Nevertheless, some parts of the Bible 
were newly translated into Italian and Spanish, and a sort of 
"French Bible," or Compend of Biblical History, by Peter 
Comestor, was put forth in the time of Charles the Wise 
(1370), the founder of the royal library at Paris. But no book 
so charmed the people as the Bible, when it came in some 
intelligible form ; and they made immensely popular the Ormu- 
lum, or versified Gospel (1240), and the "Miracle Plays," in 
which were awkwardly dramatized such Biblical themes as the 
infancy and the crucifixion of our Lord. The Saxon nun, Ros- 
witha, is famous for this sort of literature. Luther said that 
they were often better than the sermons of the mediaeval 
clergy. They gave way to the Bible when it was published in 
every man's mother-tongue. 

An Italian deserves mention for his activity and good 
doctrine. About 1170 Raymond Palmaris, a thriving artisan 
of Placentia, with a family, studied the Scriptures, and used 
his knowledge in promoting the salvation of the neglected 
people. On Sundays and holidays he opened his workshop 
to his fellow -laborers, and talked to them of practical Chris- 
tianity. So many came from all quarters to hear him, that he 



316 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

was urged to preach in the streets and the market-place. 
"No," said he, "only the priests and the learned should 
preach so publicly; an uneducated man like myself might 
easily fall into mistakes." After the death of his wife, he pro- 
vided for his only remaining child, assumed the garb of a monk, 
and made a pilgrimage ; but in a dream he thought he heard 
the voice of Christ saying: "Roam no more about the world. 
Go back to thy native Placentia, where there are so many poor, 
widowed, sick, and contentious people ; act benevolently, heal 
quarrels, and restore the wandering to the good way." He 
returned, opened charitable houses for needy men and women, 
visited prisons, took outcast children in his arms and found 
them a home, hushed the strife of factions, and appealed to 
the love of Him who gave his life for the salvation of the lost. 
Thus laboring for twenty -two years, he cheerfully looked for- 
ward to death, testifying that he put no trust in his own merits, 
but confided solely in the merits of Christ. 

V. The English and Irish Churches. 

After Anselm, the next great churchman in England was 
Thomas a. Becket (i 118-70), son of the Mayor of London,* a 
student of men, the world, and policy rather than books ; a gay 
young man, and the confidant of King Henry II (1154-89), who 
made him Chancellor of State. ' ' They have but one heart and 
mind," said primate Theobald. But when Thomas was over- 
loaded with honors and riches, his king made him Archbishop 
of Canterbury. ' ' You will soon hate me as much as you now 
love me," said Becket, "for you assume an authority over the 
Church to which I shall never assent." He threw up the office 
of chancellor, and that enraged Henry. He trained himself to 
an outward piety, and was ready for the great coming question. 
Henry was to represent the civil power, Becket the ecclesias- 
tical, and all Europe to look on the hot strife. Passing over 
their quarrels about taxes and revenues, I notice: (1) The 
question of jurisdiction. Some clerics committed notorious 
crimes. Becket claimed that his ecclesiastical courts, and no 



*Lord Campbell, with others, lays stress on Becket's alleged Saxon birth and 
championship of the Anglo-Saxon interests in the war of races. Freeman asserts 
that "this is a mere dream," which Thierry made romantic; that Becket was 
of Norman birth, and that by his time the conflict of races had virtually ceased. 



THE IRISH CHURCH. 317 

other, must punish them. Henry asserted that they were vio- 
lators of the civil law, and must be punished by the civil courts. 
This and other grievances led to (2) the Constitutions of Clar- 
endon, which placed the Church almost entirely under the civil 
power. (3) Becket saw that this was a revolt against papal 
ideas, and he went over to the papal side. He appealed to 
Rome, and was six years in exile. (4) His return was hailed 
with joy by the English rather than by the Norman element 
(1170); but he had not labored a year to exercise the power 
with which the pope had armed him for deposing Henry's 
bishops, when he was murdered in his own cathedral. He com- 
mitted his soul and the Church "to God and St. Mary!" In 
horror of this crime many said that it was the blackest since 
the crucifixion ! Becket's tomb became the rival of the Holy 
Sepulcher for pilgrimages and supposed miracles. Henry was 
at last willing to do hard penance there for the murder, and 
thus secure peace to his conscience, and with the pope. 

There is another side to Henry's connection with the papacy. 
He opposed its supremacy in England, but helped to rivet it 
upon Ireland. We saw the Irish Church afflicted by the North- 
men. The Celtic Church and schools were greatly revived after 
the battle of Clontarf (1014), where the aged king, Brian Boru, 
died in the arms of victory. If the Irish had Christianized the 
defeated Northmen, the independence of their Church might 
have been longer preserved. But the Norse settlers received 
missionaries from the lands of their kindred. Glad to see 
the Normans in England, they sent their bishops to be con- 
secrated at Canterbury. They had three bishops in their chief 
cities, Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick. Thus they were on 
the way to Rome, with no speedy following by the native Irish. 
About 1084 Gregory VII sent a letter to the king, clergy, and 
laity of Ireland, inviting them to acknowledge his supremacy 
over them, but it seems to have had no effect. Nor did they 
adopt clerical celibacy, nor reduce the number of their bishops — 
one for nearly every church and convent — nor modify their old 
presbyterial, or synodical, polity, at the earnest request of 
Lanfranc, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It seems that An- 
selm induced the pope to commission the first papal legate ever 
known in Ireland. This was Gilbert, perhaps an Ostman reared 
at Bangor, a pupil or friend of Anselm at Bee, and now the 



318 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

active bishop of Limerick. By this time Irish pilgrims had 
seen wonders in Rome : had admired pictures, statues, Gregorian 
chants, splendid churches, and the Lateran palace, whose abom- 
inations were shrewdly concealed from their uncultured eyes ; 
and they had nurtured a desire for the alliance of their Church 
with "the center of unity. " The legate was favorably received. 
He presided at the Synod of Rathbreasail, 1 1 10, where sat 
King O'Brien and his southern nobles, with nearly sixty bish- 
ops, three hundred priests, and monks uncounted. The north 
half of Ireland seems to have had but one representative. The 
result was that Ireland was to be laid out into prelatic dioceses, 
and the worship conformed to the Roman model. This synod 
marks the transition of the Irish Church from presbyterial to 
diocesan epicopacy. "What was worse, " says Killen, "the 
Irish were placed under the dominion of the pope, who quickly 
taught them to know the bitterness of an iron despotism." 
The Romanizing policy met with no little opposition. It 
was rendered more popular by one of the most remarkable men 
in the history of Ireland — Malachy, the son of a married clergy- 
man and theological lecturer in the monastery at Armagh. He 
was born about 1095, and well educated. Often at Clairvaux, 
he charmed St. Bernard, who wrote his life, saying that this 
genial Celt was no more injured by the barbarism of his island 
than fishes are by the salt of the sea. At first he felt that he 
was preaching, not to men but to beasts, so shameless were 
they in manners, savage in their clan-fights, and unwilling to 
obey laws or Gospel. But as he went about, on foot, ' ' dis- 
tributing even to the ungrateful the measure of heavenly wheat, 
their barbarism was stilled, their hardness ceased; the Roman 
laws were introduced, the customs of the Church every-where 
received, churches built, and clergy ordained in them." The 
picture is overdrawn, but Malachy was, doubtless, a civilizer. 
As Archbishop of Armagh he toiled to bring the old parish 
bishops under the prelatic system. Bernard's order of monks 
soon flourished in the green Isle. Culdeism went out, and had 
this compliment from Bernard, that before his Cistercians en- 
tered, Ireland had never seen a monk ! * 



*One might think Ireland had not yet become enthusiastic for Mary, if Petrie 
and O' Donovan correctly infer "that there is not a single church to be found in Ire- 
land dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, of an earlier age than the twelfth century." 



INVASION OF IRELAND. 319 

And still the ancient Isle of Saints was not sufficiently con- 
formed to Rome. Its schools had once drawn princes from 
other lands. It had sent scores of missionaries and not a few 
literary men and philosophers over Europe. But now Hadrian 
IV — Breakspeare, the only Englishman ever raised to the papal 
chair — describes it as a land of darkness, "nurseries of vice," and 
in need of the crusading type of missions. Perhaps he wished 
to find some excuse for granting to Henry II and his then chan- 
cellor, Becket, a charter for the invasion of Ireland. This 
was one of Henry's earliest schemes, and for the virtual pur- 
chase of the papal sanction he offered to pay from each Irish 
house a yearly tribute of one penny (then about sixty cents of 
our money) to St. Peter. In his bull, 1 1 5 5, this English pope 
approved of the "pious and laudable design," and held it to be 
good "for extending the borders of the Church." So the 
English king was papally commissioned "to reduce the people 
to obedience to laws, and extirpate the nurseries of vice;" to 
bring Ireland under "the jurisdiction of St. Peter," and "teach 
the Christian faith to the ignorant and rude." And thus "you 
may be entitled to the fullness of eternal reward in God, and 
obtain a glorious renown on earth throughout all ages."* 

Young Henry waited nearly sixteen years for this ' ' glorious 
renown," for the English barons manfully opposed the infa- 
mous crusade, and vexing affairs pressed on him. The fact 
that Dermod, a worthless, savage, deposed and exiled King of 
Leinster, paid homage to him and asked help to put down 
some Irish clans, opened the gate for some English adventurers 
to win, by their swords and by marriages, large domains in 
Ireland. In 1171 Henry went over with a strong army. Re- 
sistance was hopeless; one chief after another hastened to do 
him homage. The clergy regarded the conquest as a judgment 
for the sins of the people, especially for their old habits of 
piracy and enslaving persons of English birth. It seems that 
the prelates consigned and chartered the kingdom to Henry and 
his heirs forever. They doubtless knew of Hadrian's bull, and 



*"No wonder that Roman Catholic authors are ashamed of this document," 
says Killen (Eccl. Hist. Ireland, I, 212), who has cited abundant proofs of its 
genuineness. Malone says, " Hadrian IV, who authorized the invasion of 
Henry II, was choked" (he died of quinsy). The schoolman, John of Salis- 
bury, obtained the bull, and recorded the fact in his Metalogicus. 



320 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

certainly read it in 1 1 75, when it was published with the con- 
firmation of Pope Alexander III, who wished the king and the 
Irish to believe that ' ' the Roman Church has, by right, author- 
ity over islands different from what she possesses over the 
main-land of the Continent." Thus the Isle and the Church of 
St. Patrick began their long submission to English kings and 
Roman popes. Both politically and ecclesiastically she was 
''like a man badly wounded by an enemy, and then left to 
linger out a wretched existence." Native chieftains in the cen- 
ter and west still ruled their clans by the old Brehon law. The 
eastern coast became "the English Pale," and even there the 
colonists were Erinized. In the long run of anarchy, the only 
real conqueror was Rome, whose prelates were more intent 
upon thorough work than the English viceroy. If Ireland had 
been left more free, or had come more fully under English rule, 
there might have been two blissful results : a more unified 
nation, and a less papalized Church. Yet we shall hear the 
voice of an Irish primate, Richard Fitzralph, ringing at Oxford, 
where John Wyclif will hear it and take courage. 

VI. English Reformers before Wyclif. 

If the chivalrous crusader, Richard I (1189-99), were less in 
romance he might be greater in history. The moral of his 
public life is, that brilliant service far away can never atone for 
the neglect of duties at home. England would have been the 
gainer if he been less a wonder to Christendom, and more of a 
statesman to his people; saved them from the taxation which 
always kindles thought in the tax-payer; and tried hard to instill 
into the rank soul of his brother John some notion of moral 
character. Men and women, who had been proud of the lion- 
hearted Richard, were filled with shame by the lusts of King 
John. Yet his reign of nearly seventeen years (1199-1216) is 
marked by flashes of his own abilities, and by a great victory 
of churchmen and barons. 

By misrule John lost Normandy, and this loss was a real 
gain to England. Her races fused more readily, her old lan- 
guage rang out more clearly, her nationality was pruned, her 
Church was less trammeled by Continental ties. But suddenly 
John threw both nation and Church into the hands of Innocent 
III, and his king-craft was no match for the diplomacy of this 



PAPAL INTERDICT. 32 1 

greatest of popes. In 1206 John put his counselor, John de 
Grey, into the primacy of Canterbury. The bishops and monks 
were angry about it, for they were not allowed the right of 
election. They appealed to Rome. The pope took his time, 
willing that the contending parties should worry each other into 
obedience to him. The next year he decided, what required 
no slow infallibility, that the clergy and monks were the proper 
electors. Their proctors were at Rome, and he urged them to 
elect their countrymen, Cardinal Stephen Langton, thus doing 
England a nobler service than he intended. They chose him, 
and the pope assumed to consecrate him archbishop. John 
was asked by the holy father to 'admit him. But John was 
furious; he raved, blustered, refused all new entreaties, and 
declared that he would make his realm independent of "the 
center of unity." He fell upon the monks of Canterbury, took 
away their lands, drove them off to foreign convents. He was 
coolly told by the pope that an interdict was coming if he did 
not listen to the bishops who were sent to admonish him. He 
burst into another rage, turned them out of doors, and uttered 
threats against all messengers from the Roman court. 

During the Lent of 1208 an interdict was declared. Relig- 
ious services, even the mass and the ritual over the dead,* must 
cease in England, until Langton should be received as arch- 
bishop. John resisted it with something of his father's energy. 
He banished the higher clergy, who cared less for the people 
than for the pope; one bishop remained, not bravely to minister 
truth and sacraments, but servilely to attend the king and plot 
mischief. The Cistercians went to the poor with the consola- 
tions of religion until the pope compelled them to refrain. It 
was not possible to enforce the interdict in all its rigor, for the 
nobles protected some of the lower clergy and monks in their 
religious services. When excommunicated and even deposed 
by the pope, John would not let the bishops enter England 
to pronounce the anathema. In 12 10 Innocent absolved all 
English subjects from obedience to their king, and it is said that 
John sought an alliance with the Mohammedans of Africa to 
demolish the papacy. Two years later the pope invited King 

* "As for preaching of sermons, the laziness and ignorance of those times had 
long before interdicted them." (Fuller.) Scotland was under an interdict in 
1217-18, thus sharing in the papal oppression over nearly all Western Europe. 



322 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Philip of France, whom an interdict had brought into submis- 
sion, to make a crusade upon England. Preparations were made 
for it, but John's vast army and fleet warded off the danger. 
We have some gauges of the papal mastery in the strange 
facts, that the powerful Philip resisted an interdict but seven 
months, while "the pusillanimous and unpopular John," with 
the western nations against him, held out against a like pres- 
sure for nearly six years. 

At length diplomacy did its work. John won to him the 
barons of Poitou, gained the Count of Flanders, enlisted his 
nephew, Otho, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, now 
under papal ban, and dreamed of a vast confederation which 
would teach Philip the logic of a crusade. To conquer he must 
have peace with Innocent. He met the Roman legate near 
Dover. He let Pandulf lift and then replace his crown. He 
swore fealty to the pope. He would be the pope's vassal. He 
gave to Langton the chair at Canterbury. He restored the 
exiled bishops and monks to their places and properties. He 
seemed mighty in his own eyes, but mean in the sight of his 
people, who murmured, "He has become the pope's man; the 
free king takes the level of a serf." 

Thus the papacy reached its climax in England. What 
brought it down to a far lower step? John's army and allies 
were defeated in Flanders.* He was beaten in Poitou. His 
grand league was dissolved. He returned home to find the 
barons, who would not serve in his foreign campaign, openly 
demanding a constitution with guaranties of liberty and law. 
And the clergy, seeing his dangerous power, forsook the crown 
and went over to the baronial party. The Church and the 
Nobles were now united against the king. At their head was 
Stephen Langton, whom Innocent himself had long battled to 
place over them, not dreaming of the grand result. Never did 
pontiff more completely outwit himself. The pope had said, 
"He is an Englishman, honest, very wise, fine-looking, faultless 
in morals, every way fit to govern the English Church." As 



* "It is to the victory of Bouvines that England owes her great charter. 
From the hour of his submission to the papacy John's vengeance on the barons 
had only been delayed till he should return a conqueror from the fields of 
France. A sense of their danger nerved the nobles to resistance. 5 ' (Green, 
Short Hist. Eng. People.) 



MAGNA CHARTA. 323 

chancellor of Paris he knew good law; as cardinal he could 
fathom the papal designs ; as archbishop he saw what the Angli- 
can Church needed ; as an admirer of Becket he was not afraid 
of a king ; with Anselm as his model he hoped to maintain the 
power of "the bishop of bishops" within ecclesiastical limits; 
and as a patriot he had the Saxon love of freedom, along with 
the Norman culture and tact. He was the clear-headed cham- 
pion of national rights. Churchmen as he was, he sought to 
break John's vassalage to the pope. As a statesman he wished 
to save the king, but bring him to terms, so that true royalty 
might deserve true loyalty. He spoke for the barons in their 
conferences with the king, and one good day's work — June 15, 
12 1 5 — at Runnymede, resulted in the Magna Charta, to which 
patriots and churchmen have since looked as the first clearly 
announced basis of English liberty. It set forth that "the 
Church of England shall be free, and shall have her rights 
entire and her liberties uninjured." It restored, so far as words 
could do it, the old Saxon habit of national self-government. 

Innocent urged "our dearest son in Christ, the illustrious 
King John," to stop all this, but John had already exclaimed, 
in his wrath at defeats, that since his reconciliation with God 
and the pope every thing had gone ill with him. "They have 
given me four-and- twenty over-kings," said he, and he raved on 
till death. Innocent, swearing by St. Peter, pelted the barons 
with anathemas, which were "a fright to few, a mock to many, 
and a hurt to none." He sent out a bull to annul the great 
charter; released all men from it; suspended Langton and cen- 
sured the bold man, when he appeared at Rome, for not heed- 
ing the suspension; laid an interdict upon London, but soon 
died (12 16), without the sight of English vassalage to him. 

For twelve more years Langton gave to the Church and 
Charter his public energies.* He with the civil ministry stopped 
the granting of English benefices to foreigners. But when he 
was gone the battle for liberty went hard. During the long and 

* Among his writings are some commentaries. He is credited with the 
division of the Bible into chapters, which he made simply as marks of his read- 
ing on his journeys. This is also attributed to Cardinal Hugo St. Claro (1260), 
who edited the Vulgate and made a Concordance of its words; the first concord- 
ance having been attempted by Antony of Padua (1230), so famous for preach- 
ing to the fishes at Rimini. The fishes are said to have spoken and nodded 
assent to his sermons, and by this miracle many heretics were converted. 



324 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

stormy reign of Henry III (1216-73), the learning of Roger 
Bacon ought to have had freer course ; the patriotism of the 
devout primate, Edmund Rich, a man of the Anselmic type, 
deserved a better success; the royal oaths to Charter and 
Church ought to have barred England against papal legates 
and swarms of foreign priests and monks ; and a clamorous peo- 
ple ought to have been heard in the cry for their rights. Good 
men were sent from the helm of state ; the crew seemed wilder 
than the winds; yet beneath the waves the heavy groundswell 
was carrying the ship to the headlands, where such deliverers 
as Grossetete, Simon Montfort, and the royal Edwards would 
save her from wreck. Public disorders could not stay the 
advance of a party in learning, reforms, independence, consti- 
tutional law, and theology. 

This powerful movement began as early as 1224, when the 
English Church was so debased that the Gray Friars of Francis, 
and the Black Friars of Dominic, came as actual reformers. It 
is touching to read of their landing at Dover, getting lost in 
the woods on their way to London and Oxford, being taken 
for jugglers at a convent and turned away, lodging under a tree 
and seeking cheap places to live in the towns. The older monks 
had begun in the country; the friars wisely began in the towns 
and cities. They were then the friends of the people. None 
else cared so much for the poor. They lodged in hovels, gar- 
rets, decayed synagogues, butcher-shops, and huddled together 
in Winter to keep warm. Many of them had been trained in 
the universities of France and Italy. They began their work 
in lazar-houses and pestilential alleys; they pushed it into the 
universities, got into professors' chairs, and ranked among the 
schoolmen. Soon there were (1) friars of both orders, (2) reg- 
ular clergy of Dunstan's kind, and (3) secular clergy, some of 
them married, all in jealousy of each other, and struggling for 
pre-eminence. 

The Gray Friars not only began to teach at Oxford in a 
little room, but they were eager to learn. They requested 
Robert Grossetete, the finest of scholars, to lecture to them, 
and teach them ''the subtleties suitable for preaching." He 
struck away from the dry "Sentences" of Peter Lombard into 
Holy Scripture. Their provincial-general went in to see how 
things were progressing. He was astounded to find them dis- 



ROBERT GROSSETETE. 325 

cussing, "Whether there is a God?" and he exclaimed, "Alas, 
simple brethren are penetrating the heavens, and the learned 
dispute whether God exists!" It was well for them to know 
the reality of that truth and preach it from conviction. They 
were in the hands of "the holy Bishop Robert," perhaps the 
brightest character, and the best theologian in England ; the 
man who began life as a peasant's son caused men to wonder 
at him as the great-head {grossetete), became a friar, and per- 
suaded Roger Bacon' to be a Franciscan, for thus weight might 
be given to his projected reforms. If these friars could reverse 
the decayed style of monasticism, restore preaching, and tell 
the herds of ignorant people the way of personal salvation, they 
would help to purify the Church, and benefit all society, for 
they came as spiritual and physical sanitarians. This Francis- 
can school of Grossetete at Oxford grew famous, and educated 
professors for Lyons, Cologne, and Paris. 

The influence of Robert Grossetete (1 175-1253) is seen in 
personal piety, sterling worth, high scholarship, knowledge of 
the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, various writings, pastoral 
care, patriotism, and measures for the good of the nation and 
the Church. He was long quoted as an oracle. As a re- 
former he had the ideas of his time, and not fully those of the 
sixteenth century. The University of Oxford was elevated in 
its moral and literary tone. It stood out against papal exac- 
tions. The friars made it more practical and popular. In 
1235 Robert became Bishop of Lincoln, then a large and influ- 
ential diocese, and somewhat reformed by bishop "Hugh the 
Great," the uncompromising foe of immorality and the laziness 
of the monks. England had no other prelate so zealous for 
reform, even so long as he favored the papal side of English 
affairs. He greatly repressed the secular clergy, because they 
were corrupt, ignorant, selfish, gamblers at taverns rather than 
exemplary pastors. His error, and that of other bishops, was 
in giving too broad range to the friars, who did not always 
wait for episcopal sanction. They invaded parishes. They 
raised a laugh at the secular clergy. They showed the license 
from the pope. They held short, lively, more attractive serv- 
ices ; they preached, administered sacraments, directed con- 
sciences, took gifts, got legacies from the dying. They 
were not slow in degenerating. The fine horses and fashion- 



326 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

able boots of some mendicants, were soon equal to those of the 
fox-hunting clergy. Others had a more refined ambition. 
They were skillful teachers. They sat learnedly in the chairs 
of the universities. Their lectures were fresher than the plati- 
tudes of the scholastics. Grossetete lived to regret the change 
that came over the preaching friars. 

The good bishop saw two enormities : The export of tithes, 
now demanded (not requested as formerly) by the pope ; and 
the importation of monks and priests from the lounging 
places of Italy. With all his might he resisted these evils, and 
well defended his diocese from them.* The barons said, 
"These Italians draw from our Church sixty thousand marks 
annually, a sum greater than the ordinary revenues of the 
crown, and immense sums are sent by us to Rome." The 
good bishop grew warm and prophetic, saying, substantially, in 
a sermon, "To follow a pope who rebels against the will 
of Christ is to separate from Christ ; it is schism ! If the time 
shall come when men follow an erring pontiff, then will be the 
great apostasy. Then will true Christians refuse to obey 
Rome." The pope, Innocent IV, nominated his nephew, a 
mere child, to a high office in the cathedral of Lincoln. This 
roused the bishop to reply, "Your orders are destitute of 
piety. Every faithful Christian should oppose them with all his 
might." He refused to yield, when the pope suspended him. 
"Who is this old dotard that dares to judge my actions?" 
was the papal question. "If my generosity did not restrain 
me, I would order him to be thrown into prison." A cardinal 
said, ' ' Better not ; he is a holy man, holier than we are ; what 
he says is too true. Too many people know it." But the pope 
excommunicated him. The aged hero did not regard the sen- 

* " In 1 23 1, the Roman exactions produced public tumults, and led to the 
quarrel which ruined Hubert de Burgh (the eminent patriot). In 1237, the king 
invited Cardinal Otho to reform the Church. He stayed till 1241, visited Ox- 
ford and put the university under interdict ; visited Scotland [in face of blunt 
threats] in 1239, and in 1240 exacted enormous sums for the benefit of the pope, 
besides forbidding the king to bestow preferment on Englishmen until three 
hundred Italians were provided for [Grossetete highly roused thereby]. In 1244 
Innocent IV sent a still more intolerable representative, Master Martin, who 
within a year was obliged to fly ; but neither king nor Parliament ventured to 
refuse money. . . . There was, too, a constant succession of appeals to 
Rome, as the episcopal elections were disputed." (Professor Stubbs, Early 
Plantag., 185-6.) 



EDWARD I. 327 

tence more than to appeal to the tribunal of Christ. He was 
immovable. He died in the quiet possession of his office. On 
his death-bed he insisted that many of the friars were powdered 
hypocrites, and the pope was antichrist. Disowned at Rome, 
the pretended center of unity, he was honored and sustained by 
the best of Englishmen. Sewal, the Archbishop of York, had 
imitated him, and "the more the pope cursed, the more the 
people blessed." 

As the chief exponent of public disorders,* Grossetete had 
helped to rear a party and strengthen Earl Simon de Montfort, 
the son of that Montfort who fought the Albigenses, but a 
very notable Englishman, whose wife was sister of the king. 
The bishop instructed his sons, and is said to have told him 
that the English Church could not be saved from the king and 
the papal system except by the warrior's sword. In 1265, 
"Simon the Righteous" virtually created the House of Com- 
mons, by summoning the farmer and the merchant to sit with 
the knight, the baron, and the bishop, in the Councils of State. 
Thenceforth the English yeoman, the third estate, had a voice 
and a vote in the legislature. The nation began to be termed the 
Commonwealth, for all classes had a common weal to promote. 

King Edward I (1 274-1 307), the conqueror of Simon, and 
brilliant crusader, "the greatest of all the Plantagenets, " aimed 
to make England a mighty power in Christendom. He sub- 
dued Wales. He overcame Wallace, and thus intensified the 
long and fierce strifes between the Scots and the English. His 
motto, Pactum Serva, indicated his intent to maintain the 
Great Charter and keep good faith with his people. He won 
the title of the English Justinian. He checked the undue 
powers of the barons and clergy ; he fostered the growth of 
the middle classes ; he denied that the pope was his superior, 
or even his equal, in the government of his realm ; he brought 
order out of chaos; he left society more united by law, and 
the nation more powerful for peace and war; and, after his 
death in 1307, men called him "Edward the Good." 

England struggled on for more civil and religious liberty, 

*King Henry III usually got his supplies by seizing them. "Can not I 
send and seize your corn and thresh it?" he proudly asked his Earl Marshal. 
"And can not I send you the heads of the threshers?" was the spirited reply. 
Church property was little more sacredly spared by many of the kings. 



328 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

losing rather than gaining, until Edward III gave it a lift. As 
king, 1327-77, he was of great political service to Wyclif. It 
was the age of mighty battles — Bannockburn, Calais, Crecy, 
Poitiers* — and the literary achievements of Dante and Chau- 
cer. The blaze of genius evinced an awakening of the human 
intellect. The schemes of Providence were most wonderful. 
The ground was clearing for the plowshares of reform, educa- 
tion, and higher freedom. We have less to do with Edward's 
wars than his laws, which show the increasing aversion of En- 
glishmen to the jurisdiction of the Church, and especially of the 
pope. Three laws were either restored or enacted : (1) Mortmain, 
to prevent dying persons from being unduly persuaded to give 
their wealth to priests and the Church ; or property, not disposed 
of by wills, from going to the Church. The intention was to pre- 
vent churches and convents, and especially Rome, from getting 
more and more lands. The greater part of the best lands were 
already in the hands of the Church. (2) Pivvisors, which made 
null and void all ecclesiastical appointments that were contrary 
to the rights of the king or the churches and parishes inter- 
ested. The pope must not be able to foist his tools and surplus 
of monks into English benefices. (3) Praemunire, (re-enacted 
in 1389), to fortify the king and kingdom against papal inter- 
ference. It forbade appeals to Rome, and the enforcement of 
papal excommunications. England would judge and discipline 
her own subjects in her own courts. 

Edward refused to pay the long withheld tithe to Rome. 
Pope Urban V summoned him — the renowned conqueror at 
Crecy — to acknowledge the pope as the lawful and absolute 
sovereign of England! The king called on God to avenge the 
insult. From Oxford came the avenger. The ignorance and 
sins of the clergy, at that time, were scarcely more boldly ex- 
posed by Wyclif than by 

" That renowned Poet 
Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled, 
On Fame's eternal beadroll worthy to be fyled." 

And while preacher and poet were laying bare the corrup- 
tions of the Church, "The Good Parliament" was thus pro- 
testing, "The brokers of the sinful city of Rome promote for 
money unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to benefices of the value 

-Note III. 



BONIFACE VIII. 329 

of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain 
of twenty. So decays sound learning. They present aliens 
[foreigners] who neither see nor care to see their parishioners, 
despise God's services, convey away the treasure of the realm, 
and are worse than Jews or Saracens. The pope's revenue 
from England alone is larger than that of any prince in Chris- 
tendom. God gave his sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven 
and shorn." Grossetete had said bravely to Pope Innocent IV, 
"Oh, money, money! How great is thy power, particularly 
in this court of Rome." Soon afterwards St. Bridget, a Swed- 
ish princess and nun devoted to the Virgin Mary, said that 
Rome had condensed the ten commandments into two words — 
"Give gold!" 

VII. The Papacy divided against Itself. 

In Germany the political dissent against Rome was a means 
of dividing the papacy, and thus working good for civil and 
religious freedom. But it did not unify and organize the Ger- 
man people into a great nation. Liberty seized her grand op- 
portunity and some of the results are seen in freer German 
States and in the Italian and Swiss Republics. The Church was 
a sufferer in the wars of the Emperor Frederic II (1212-50) 
upon the popes; he being supported by the Ghibelines and 
they by the Guelphs.* The popes had become military rather 
than moral rulers. The control of the papacy was transferred 
from Germany to France, and one memorial of the change was 
the revengeful massacre of all the French in Sicily during the 
"Sicilian Vespers" (1282). 

Papal absolutism was still asserted by Boniface VIII (1294- 
1303), who introduced or revived the centennial jubilee, prom- 
ising the fullest forgiveness of sins to all pilgrims to Rome in 
the year 1300, and so great was the financial success of the 
scheme that a jubilee was held every fiftieth, and then every 
twenty-fifth year. Boniface raised papal arrogance to its gid- 
diest height, and provoked a recoil, from which Rome has 
never recovered. 



* In 1 140 the Imperialists and the Papalists were at war as usual. The Ho- 
henstaufers shouted for Waiblingen, which the Italians shaped into Ghibeline, 
and the Bavarians for Welf, or Guelph. These became the war-cries, the one 
for the emperor, the other for the pope, as they long battled for supremacy in the 
Holy Roman Empire. 



330 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

The contest between Boniface and Philip IV, King- of 
France (1285-1314), is one of the turning-points of modern his- 
tory. The king levied a tax on the French clergy; the pope 
forbade it to be collected. Other interests were drawn into the 
long struggle. The papal bull " Unam Sanctam," in 1303, 
asserted the most extreme powers of the pope, but so utterly 
failed to maintain them that it marks the decline of the papacy. 
' ' It was Philip the Fair who struck the first successful blow 
against the towering fabric of the papal dominion : it was he 
who overthrew the mighty system founded by Hildebrand. 
From this date the popes may be said to have ceased to be 
formidable to the social states of Europe."* The popes became 
the creatures of the political powers. That their supremacy 
was broken is shown by two events. 

1. The papacy was controlled by the French for seventy 
years (1308-78), while the popes had their " Babylonish Cap- 
tivity" at Avignon. The Germans and Italians set up rival 
popes. The dissoluteness of the age was startled when the 
citizens of Rome revolted against the nobles, and formed a 
republic under the leadership of Rienzi, whose dream of restor- 
ing the old Roman grandeur has been the dream of almost 
every great Italian, from Dante to Mazzini. This self-appointed 
tribune brought in "the Good Estate," and ruled by the force 
of his will, oratory, and fanaticism for a brief time (1347), in 
which there were better morals externally in Rome, and fewer 
brigands in the neighborhood. When he was arrested and con- 
demned, the poet Petrarch saved his life. Innocent VI restored 
him to power, 1354, but the nobles defied him, and a mob 
ferociously took his life. In his day politics were bad, and 
actual religion worse, f 

2. The papal power was lessened by the Great Schism 

* Philip was sustained by the Parliament of Paris, now the chief of all the 
parliaments of other cities; and by the new organization of the States General, 
composed of the nobles, higher clergy, and the Tiers Etat, or representatives 
of the people. France seemed to be more advanced than England in resistance 
to papal supremacy. But Philip, by a disgraceful bargain, secured the election 
of the next pope, Clement V (1305-14), managed him, and they joined in the 
terrible, murderous work of destroying the Templars. These knights had be- 
come vicious, rich, and oppressive to society. Many of them were burnt as 
heretics. None of them probably deserved a Christian name. They were an 
outcome of the Crusades. 

t Superstition was powerful. Gregory XI was induced to try a residence at 



THE TURKISH CONQUEST. 33 1 

(1378-1429) — not its first, but at least its twenty- second 
schism — which began when Urban VI sat at Rome as the choice 
of England, Ireland, Italy, and most countries east of the Rhine : 
while Clement VII sat at Avignon, supported by France, Spain, 
Scotland, Sicily, and Cyprus. The whole Western Church was 
rent in twain by the secularized papacy, which never recovered 
its former power. But Romish theologians say that the faithful, 
thus divided in their views of a fact, were not at variance on the 
principle of a united and infallible primacy: that "this fatal 
division should not be called a schism, because the number of 
obediences did not impair the principle of unity, since all the 
Churches equally believed in but one Roman Church and one 
only sovereign pontiff," and that St. Peter was represented in 
the ideal papacy itself, according to some abstract realism. 
Then we infer that visible unity and verifiable succession are not 
absolutely essential even to the Church of St. Peter! Still the 
logic of the University of Paris could not thus unify the hatreds 
of rival popes, and its eminent divines sought the principle of 
unity in reformatory councils. 

The logic of the Turks was more effective. They had con- 
quered Asia Minor. They were gazing wishfully upon Europe. 
In 1352 the Greek emperor used twelve thousand of them to 
put down the Bulgarians, and paid them from the treasuries of 
the churches and monasteries of his capital. In 1354 the walls 
of several cities in Thrace were thrown down by earthquakes, 
and the Turkish warrior, Suliman, filled the abandoned houses 
of Callipolis with Turkish families. Thus began the settlement 
of the Ottomans in Europe. From that time they advanced, 
taking towns and provinces, until Constantinople was nearly 
surrounded by them. They did it largely by an army of Chris- 
tians by birth. Orkan (1326-60), the organizer of the Ottoman 
Empire, required a tribute of children from his Christian sub- 



Rome, in 1376, relying on the influence and attendance of Catherine of Siena, 
a dyer's daughter, a charitable nun and visionary, who pretended that her 
diamond ring had been given her by the Savior as her special bridegroom (as 
He had been of the legendary Catherine of Alexandria, 307), and that on her 
body were the five wounds (stigmata) of Christ miraculously received. In the 
great schism she took the part of Urban VI, who appointed her his agent at the 
court of Joanna II, of Naples, though she had not strength to go. Such fanatics 
were not rare in that age. Most of them, by their reputed miracles and saintli- 
ness, won canonization by admiring popes. 



332 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

jects. These were trained so as to lose all affection for home, 
kindred, and early faith. They became as obedient to the sul- 
tans as the Jesuits have since been to the popes. They won 
renown as soldiers, and then some young Turks were enrolled 
in their body. For almost five hundred years (1330 to 1826) 
these oft-recruited Janizaries represented the ceaseless out- 
rage of Turkish Mohammedanism upon Christian families, faith, 
and country. When this new, barbarous infidel power was 
getting strong in Europe, there was danger to the papal chair, 
the Western nations, and the Latin Church. In the union 
against the common foe, the double-headed papacy must cease. 
It was more unified. Once the Mohammedans helped to make 
Rome a center of unity by assailing the Western nations. They 
did it again when "the Turks were the saviors of the papacy." 
Strangely enough we shall find them aiding early Protestantism 
by drawing off its enemies. 



NOTES. 

I. Various sects. 1. Paulicians, named probably from a high regard 
for the Apostle Paul, and started by one Constantine, in Armenia (660). 
Probably somewhat Gnostic ; opposed the formalism of the Greek Church 
and the prelatic system: rejected images, crosses, relics, fasts, monasticism, 
priesthood, outward observance of the two sacraments and saint worship ; 
broke into parties ; were severely persecuted ; many scattered through all 
Southern Europe, and received various new names. 2. Bogomiles [friends 
of God), similar to the Paulicians, if not more Manichaean ; enemies of all 
learning, all marriage, all churchism, and nearly all decency ; spread from 
Thrace. 3. Cathari, who assumed to be the Pure, the Good ( Bonshom- 
mes), but were Gnostic and Montanistic. They mingled with the Paulicians, 
and among the new combinations seem to have been the Publicani, Bulgari, 
the Piphles ( poor people) of Flanders, the Tisserands (weavers) of Southern 
France. Some of them professed a high regard for the New Testament, 
and held that prayer, abstinence, and the baptism of the Spirit were suffi- 
cient to salvation. Bands of dissenters were found at Orleans, 1022 ; Cam- 
bray, 1025; Turin, 1030; Goslar, Germany, 1052; Cologne, Rheims, Paris, 
Treves, Strasburg, and elsewhere. Gerard and thirty German Publicani 
were at Oxford about 1160: they converted one woman, who recanted ; were 
branded, flogged, and driven out of town. Hungary was full of dissent. 
Innocent III called upon twelve Italian cities to cast out the multiplying sec- 
taries, especially the Paterini. 4. The Sect of the Free Spirit probably grew 
out of the pantheism of John Scotus ( Erigena). Its leaders were Amalric 
of Paris, Simon of Tournay, and David of Dinanto (1205). A synod con- 



NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV. 333 

demned them, and burnt the writings of Scotus, if not some members of 
the sect. 5. The Apostolic Brethren, in Italy, led by Dolcino, whose two 
thousand followers fortified themselves on a mountain for two years. Cer- 
tain crusaders reduced them. Dolcino was burnt in 1307. 6. The Steding- 
ers near Bremen (1190) opposed tithes and tribute. Charges of heresy 
against them were dropped. 7. The Flagellants (1260), in Italy and Ger- 
many : they said that self-scourging was equal to the sacraments in virtue ; 
that it would secure salvation, even if Christ had not died, and that this was 
the true baptism of blood. Many of them were burnt during the fifteenth 
century. The Dancers were less severe. 8. The Beghards (men) and 
Beguines (women) — probably named from beggen, to pray — appeared in the 
Lower Rhine countries about 1180. Devoted themselves to the care of the 
sick and strangers ; provided hospitals ; two thousand of them at Cologne in 
1250; the popes dealt hard with them. Not heretical. Beguinages still 
exist in Belgium. 9. The Lollards ( probably from lollen, lull, to sing) were 
also devoted to works of benevolence ; sang at funerals ; very active in times 
of pestilence; often suspected by the Inquisitors. They scattered forth 
from the Rhine countries. Many of them so nearly agreed with certain 
views of Wyclif that their name was applied to his followers in England. 

II. In addition to the spirit of dissent, there was a symptom of coming 
reform in " the laical spirit ; becoming alive to the rights and interests of 
civil society ; developing in the towns a body of citizens bold to confront 
clerical authority, and with their practical understanding sharpened and in- 
vigorated by diversified industry and by commerce ; a laical spirit which 
manifested itself, also, in the lower classes, in satires aimed at the vices of the 
clergy ; which likewise gave rise to a more intense feeling of patriotism, a 
new sense of the national bond, a new vigor in national Churches." ( Fisher.) 

III. In the Hundred Years' War with France, 1 336-1 451, England lost 
her Continental possessions, except Calais. By losing empire, she gained 
strength as a kingdom. The Scots did much to draw her away from the 
fate of excessive dominion, by those border wars in the rear. In all that 
southern fighting and desolation the heroism of the Black Prince (son of 
Edward III, with his new motto of Ich Dien, I serve) was not more brilliant 
than that of Jeanne d 'Arc. This Maid of Orleans is a witness to the credulity 
and barbarity of her age. There was a wild belief in her visions, voices, in- 
spirations, and prophecies. Her wonderful part in the French victory over the 
English at Orleans, 1429, was enough to rouse Charles VII and his nation to 
rescue the poor girl from the Burgundians. They basely sold her to the Duke 
of Bedford, whose English soldiers could tell how she had relieved them when 
weltering in their wounds. Her three implacable foes were the English, the 
Inquisition, and the Sorbonne, or theological faculty at Paris ; if King Charles 
was not the guiltiest of all, for he owed to her his very crown and realm. 
Perhaps an insane asylum (were there any) was the fittest place for her. 
She was charged with heresy, sorcery, blasphemy, imposture, league with 
Satan, opposition to the Church and pope, and more ; and burnt at Rouen, 
1431. As if conscious that England were under the ban of Providence, the 
secretary of Henry VI exclaimed, " We are lost! We have burnt a saint." 



334 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



Chapter XV. 

REFORMS ON FOUR BASES. 

1350-1500. 

The spirit of dissent was not always truly reformatory. 
During the one hundred and fifty years now before us (1350- 
1500), reforms were attempted on four different bases : 1. Scrip- 
ture and popular teaching, by Wyclif in England, and Huss in 
Bohemia. 2. General councils and episcopal power, by Gerson 
and his colleagues at Paris. 3. Pietism, or personal spirituality, 
by the Societies of the Common Life in the Lower Rhine-lands. 
4. Scripture, popular preaching, and theocratic republicanism, 
by Savonarola at Florence. The first of these movements had 
two centers, in the Universities of Oxford and Prague. In each 
center there was a vigorous spirit of reform, original and inde- 
pendent of the other, before the voice of Wyclif was heard. 
But Wyclif enlightened it, gave it new direction and energy, 
and then the influence of Oxford upon Prague was manifest. 

Walter de Merton had founded his college at Oxford in the 
interest of liberty and sound learning. Duns Scotus had flung 
upon it the shadow of Pelagianism. This reproach was rolled 
off by Thomas Bradwardine, the genius, the pride of science, 
the Baconian in philosophy. Nature and mathematics kept him 
from the true cross until he heard, one day in the church, these 
words of St. Paul read: "It is not of him that willeth, nor of 
him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy." They 
struck him : he hated them ; but in his wrestling their truth won 
its spiritual victory. "The profound doctor" became the deep 
thinker, and sent out his book for "The Cause of God against 
Pelagius." His aim was to revive the philosophy and theology 
of Augustine, a nobler service than to ride, as the chaplain of 
King Edward, into the battle of Crecy. In 1 348 the monks of 
Canterbury elected him archbishop. At Avignon the cardinals 
laughed at the meek man when he received his pall, for they 



JOHN WYCLIF. 335 

may have known that he had helped his king to frame laws 
against papal interference. The next year he died. The Black 
Death, which seems to have removed him, had just brought 
one attentive hearer of his lectures at Merton, John Wyclif, to 
begin that life-long prayer, " O Lord, save me gratis." 

I. John Wyclif and the Lollards. 

John had come down from "a village caulled Wiclif, " prob- 
ably in Yorkshire, where he was born about 1324, and entered 
the college where culture was the most liberal and opinion 
likely to be the most free. The English wars in France had 
lowered the fame of Paris, but had built up Oxford. It was 
the very place for a reformer to be trained, and thence to send 
out a powerful light into English homes. There he was mas- 
tering the dry scholastic science of his time, his mind wearying 
itself on the logical treadmill, and finding the liveliest thought 
in Bradwardine, as the gentle lecturer warmed in his argument 
against Pelagius. Would he be merely the ninth of the school- 
men whom Oxford had produced? He outstripped all others in 
that field of study, and was named the " Evangelic Doctor." As 
a philosopher of realism he made an impression upon Europe. 

Before he recognized the wise providence that brought him 
there, and the divine grace that qualified him for his work, the 
Black Death (that terrible pestilence which seemed to be de- 
stroying half the human race, 1348) swept through England. 
Neighbors shunned each other; wives forsook their husbands, 
and mothers their children. All physicians were baffled. Fear 
and sadness invited the strange disease. Thousands of people 
grew hardened. Vice became a moral plague in Europe. The 
plague may have solved many social problems for the good of 
the surviving poor. Wyclif was in terror of death. Almost 
sleepless in his cell, he prayed that God would show him the 
path of life. He found that path in the Word of God. Sin 
appeared to him as a disease, as well as a demerit ; and the 
prayer for justification took this form: "Heal us, O Lord, for 
nought; that is, for no merit of ours, but for thy mercy!" In 
theology he, in the main, followed Augustine. He gradually 
reached those practical views which his age needed. 

' ' The personal charm which ever accompanies real greatness 
only deepened the influence he derived from the spotless purity 



336 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of his life. As yet, indeed, even Wyclif himself can hardly 
have suspected the immense range of his intellectual power. 
It was only the struggle that lay before him which revealed 
in the dry and subtle schoolman the founder of our later En- 
glish prose [as Chaucer is of poetry], a master of popular in- 
vective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous politician, an 
audacious partisan, the organizer of a religious order, the un- 
sparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable 
of controversialists, the first Reformer who dared, when deserted 
and alone, to question and deny the creed of the Christendom 
around him, to break through the tradition of the past, and 
with his last breath to assert the freedom of religious thought 
against the dogmas of the papacy. The attack of Wyclif 
began precisely at the moment when the Church of the Middle 
Ages had sunk to its lowest point of spiritual decay."* We 
know not how he alone, of all the thousand priests around 
him, who slumbered over their breviaries, came to be so roused 
as to find himself in the front rank of preachers, the champion 
of God's truth, the censor of man's inventions, and the leader 
whom all England's common people wished to see and hear. 
He seems to have had no connection with Waldensian teachers. 
He highly valued Grossetete. We first meet him battling with 
those friars, each of whom Chaucer satirizes : 

" His wallet is before him on his lap, 
Brimful of pardons come from Rome, all hot." f 

I. Wyclif against the mendicant friars. They had degener- 
ated. What they had been to the monks he would be against 
them. Once the friends, they were now the opponents, of the 
people. They held the best places in the colleges, towns, and 
parishes. They had reared fine convents, and the students 
were drawn into them. It was the fashion to assume the gray 
or the black dress, and be a Scotist or a Thomist. 

They opposed the university system. The number of stu- 
dents had fallen to about five thousand ; the number of friar- 
monks had increased. Wyclif struck at the root of the evil. 
He denounced mendicancy itself. "Our Lord Christ was no 



* Green ; Short History of the English People. 

t"The greater part of literature in the Middle Ages, at least from the 
twelfth century, may be considered as artillery leveled against the clergy." 
(Hallam.) 



PIERS PLOWMAN. 337 

mendicant." He exposed "the indolent, impudent beggars, 
roaming from house to house, taking advantage of the piety 
and simplicity of the people, and snatching the morsel of 
charity from the famishing mouths of the aged and infirm ; 
their vows of poverty just amounting to this, that whosoever 
should be hungry, they should be fed at the expense of the 
community, and riot on the earnings of industrious poverty."* 
The days when monasteries were workshops, almshouses, and 
asylums had passed. In contrast with the quackery of these 
friars he commends "the clean religion of Jesus Christ." 

In 1 361 Wyclif was master, or warden, of Baliol College. 
The primate, Sudbury, thrust him out of the office. He ap- 
pealed to the pope, and lost his case ; the monks were delighted, 
and their champions hoped to write him down. Some of them 
visited him when he was in sickness, begging him to withdraw 
the charges against their order, before he should die. Raising 
himself up, and fixing his keen eyes upon them, he said, "I 
shall not die, but live and declare the evil works of the friars." 
And he did it, by voice and pen, more elegantly, but scarcely 
more sharply, than the rustic poet, William Langland, in his 
"Vision of Piers Plowman," when he wrote, "And now is 
religion a rider, a roamer about, a leader of love -days, and a 
land-buyer." Wyclif was supported by friends, many of whose 
gifts came from unseen hands. King Edward III made him a 
royal chaplain, and Rector of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, 
while he still taught at Oxford. 

2. Wyclif against the papacy. The old papal demand for 
tithe and tribute had come up again. He took the side of the 



* In similar terms the friars were exposed by Richard Fitzralph, student, 
and then Chancellor of Oxford, and in 1347 Primate of Ireland. He said that 
in his diocese of Armagh there were about two thousand persons excommuni- 
cated for such crimes as robbery and murder, and the friars absolved them and 
admitted them to the sacraments. The friars declared that he was heterodox, 
and caused him to appear before the pope at Avignon, where his eloquence and 
zeal in preaching were unabated. His trial lasted three years. English friends, 
Wyclif says some bishops, aided him with funds. His opinions were condemned. 
He died in 1361, not without a suspicion that the monks poisoned him. His 
saintly character and reputed miracles almost won him canonization, and actu- 
ally this apology, "That he sinned rather by an exuberance of intellect than 
from perversity of will." He and others charged the friars with buying up use- 
ful books and hiding them away from the clergy. In 1363 Nicolas Orem boldly 
exposed the evils in the Church in a sermon before Pope Urban V. 

22 



333 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

barons. He was sent as one of the commissioners to meet the 
pope's envoys at Bruges (1376). They settled nothing perma- 
nently; but his eyes were opened to certain enormous evils. * 
He returned to write on "The Kingdom of God," and put 
forth some curious feudal ideas on that subject. God being 
the Suzerain of the universe, he deals out his rule in fief to 
rulers on terms of obedience to himself. All authority is 
founded in grace. (Some charged that he also applied this 
doctrine to property.) But no man on earth has it all. "The 
king is as truly God's vicar as is the pope. The royal power 
is as sacred as the ecclesiastical ; one being over the state, the 
other in the Church over spiritual affairs. The throne of God 
is the tribunal of personal appeal." He was now in collision 
with the Churchmen. Parties grew warm. The clergy upheld 
the pope, saying that if the tithes were not paid England would 
forfeit her right to govern herself, and the king would forfeit 
the allegiance of the people. The pope would loose all the 
national bonds. His interdict might fall on them ! But Eng- 
land was too far advanced to dread interdicts. The king denied 
that he was the pope's vassal and liegeman. The barons said : 
"Hold the pope to his spiritual duties; we deny his civil 
power." Wyclif was with them, and this made him immensely 
popular as a patriot. He was now regarded by high-church- 
men as a progressive heretic. 

3. Wyclif on trial. The Romanizers had their charges. 
Courtenay, the fiery Bishop of London, in 1378, cited him to 
appear in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, and answer to the 

*Such as these: I. The iniquities which spread from the papal court at 
Avignon. 2. The desire of the French popes to keep up the wars between 
France and England, so long as there was hope that the English would lose 
their possessions on the Continent. 3. Papal encroachments on the English 
statutes of Provisors and Praemunire. 4. The employment of Churchmen in high 
offices of state — a system which Wyclif opposed, even when it was represented 
by so good a man as William of Wykeham, the chancellor, and the munificent 
founder of New College, at Oxford, and another at Winchester. His pupil, 
Archbishop Chichele, an ardent opponent of Wyclif, was the generous founder 
of All Souls College, at Oxford (1437). " Amidst a sea of discord and disorder 
the colleges rose, one after another, like islands of peace. . . . From them 
came, in the Lancastrian reigns, the secular [un-monastic] clergy, who repre- 
sented the old stubborn English antagonism to papal abuses and Lollard excesses." 
The time came when "no monk or friar could obtain, admission." (Burrows; 
Worthies of All Souls, p. 7.) But this time would have come sooner if Oxford 
had not expelled Wyclif. 



JOHN OF GAUNT. 339 

charge of having taught that the Church of Rome was no more 
the head of the universal Church than any other Church ; that 
St. Peter had no greater authority given him than the rest of 
the apostles ; that bishop and presbyter, in the apostolic 
Church, were the same ; that the pope had no more jurisdiction 
in the exercise of the keys than any other priest ; that if the 
Church misbehaved it was not only lawful, but meritorious, to 
dispossess her of her temporalities ; that the Gospel was suf- 
ficient to direct a Christian in the conduct of his life ; and that 
neither the pope nor any other prelate ought to have prisons 
for the punishing of offenders against the discipline of the Church. 

Wyclif did not stand alone. ' ' I am charged as well as 
you, and I accept the challenge," said that famous man, not 
much to be admired, King Edward's fourth son, ''John of 
Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster," the father of the Red Roses, 
and other lines of kings, and the largest land-holder in Eng- 
land.* He was bent on leveling the high clergy, and having 
laymen hold such state offices as chancellor and treasurer. 
He, with a strong array of barons, stood by Wyclif 's side in 
the cathedral, and the trial did not proceed. The bishop and 
the nobles had some fierce words. ' ' Yes, my lord bishop ; 
and I '11 drag you out of this church by the hair of your 
head," is one saying reported of Duke John. The Londoners 
enlisted in the quarrel, some rushing in to protect their bishop, 
and others aiding John to rescue Wyclif. The affair was not 
conducted ecclesiastically; and at last the bishop, in another 
attempt, could do no more than dismiss the heretic with a rep- 
rimand. It was no real gain to a good cause ; and yet it was 
a tribute to the real importance of Wyclif, who went on in his 
work in behalf of popular learning and liberty. 

4. TJie insiuTection of the peasants under Wat Tyler was 
wrongly associated with the Reformer. Its coarse but popular 
preacher was John Ball, a ranting leveler, who caught up and 
perverted some of Wyclif 's utterances, and pressed the inquiry, 

"When Adam delved and Eve span, 
Where was then the gentleman ?" 

He wished to abolish gentlemen altogether. The friars may 
have been busy in it. These men raged against the lawyers, 

* Richard II had just come to the throne. He was deposed in 1399. 



340 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

judges, and chancellors. They enlisted perhaps one hundred 
thousand men, encamped at Blackheath, and aimed to destroy 
courts and tax-rolls,* rather than convents and churches. 
Their success was amazing for a time. They hated John of 
Gaunt, the patron of Wyclif, and burnt his splendid palace in 
London. They murdered Sudbury, not as archbishop, but as 
chancellor. The strong arm of the law finally repressed them 
(1381). One result of this peasant -war was that Wyclif was 
again assailed, and his cause seriously injured. 

5. Wyclif abandoned by the aristocratic party and the Church- 
men. The cause was not merely the unjust suspicion that he 
was "a sower of strife," and that some of his co-workers 
brought odium upon him, but he had attacked some of the 
doctrines of the Church. If there was one doctrine in which 
the Church system of the Middle Ages centered, it was that 
of Transubstantiation. In the "miracle of the mass" the low- 
liest priest did what no king could do — he changed the bread 
into the very body of Christ. That was the theory, and 
Wyclif had denied it, saying, " W T hat we see on the altar is 
neither Christ nor any part of him, but only an effective sign 
of him." By this time he must have preached against nearly 
all the popular superstitions, holding that there was no pur- 
gatory, but an intermediate state. No masses could benefit 
the dead. He still considered himself an obedient son of the 
Church, and the teacher of nothing which the Fathers and the 
early councils had condemned. The defect in his reform was 
in its negative character ; it needed more stress laid on justifi- 
cation by faith. Thus it would have had a positive, vivifying, 
centralizing principle. 

The grand thing is, that the more he was deserted, the 
more independent he became ; the lonelier, the bolder. The 
nobles stood aloof. Duke John, whose motives were political, 
advised him to be silent, but admired his protest closing with 
the words, "I believe that in the end the truth will conquer." 

*As in Jack Cade's rebellion (1450) : 

"Dick — The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. 
Cade — Nay, that I mean to do. . . . It is for liberty. 
We will not leave one lord, one gentleman. 
Spare none but such as go in clouted shoon ; 
For they are thrifty, honest men." 

(Shakespeare ; Henry VI, Part ii, Act iv, sc. ii.) 



THE APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE. 34 1 

The university disowned her greatest son. One day in 138 1 
the chancellor entered his class-room, and told the students that 
the teaching of the evangelic doctor was heretical, for he de- 
nied the body and blood of the Lord ! He was startled ; but 
it was useless to stand there and dispute. That would be the 
weakest policy ; he knew a wiser method. And when he 
stepped out of Oxford the university seemed for one century 
to be doomed. Its triumph was its punishment. If his cour- 
age lifted a few scholars to a higher plane of thought and life, 
the majority still crept after fossils in the exhausted quarries 
of scholasticism. Already he had sought a wider sphere than 
the schools, a larger audience than the learned ; he would try 
old England's heart. 

6. The appeal to the people, not because they were ignorant, 
but because they were honest, and hungry for the truth which 
the Church denied them. We know they had little knowledge 
of books ; they were rude, uncultured, most of them unable to 
read, or to recite the Ten Commandments. If a common man 
could write his name, he spelled it in half a dozen different ways 
(the more learned did that, even in Sir Walter Raleigh's time). 
But we do not know what power of thought they had, nor what 
vigorous thinking they did, except by this fact, that many of 
them proved themselves able to understand Wyclif, and hold 
on to his truths for one hundred and fifty years more firmly 
than the learned classes. Peter Waldo, Wyclif, and Luther 
proved the capacity of an illiterate people to lay hold of divine 
truth. To the people at large Wyclif appealed. England's 
laymen had stood by him while five papal bulls were wasted 
on him, and therefore the Romanizers had not dared to slay 
him ; for they feared the people. Let even the nobles join 
hands with the Churchmen, he would now spend all his time 
at Lutterworth, where two or three rows of thatched cabins on 
the slope above the Swift held those cottagers who had been 
five years listening to his Sunday sermons, but never dreaming 
that the good man would come and live among them as a coun- 
try parson. There he continued to translate the New Testa- 
ment. He flung aside the dry, scholastic Latin of the lecture- 
room, and rapidly sent out his tracts in the rough, strong, 
clear speech of the trader and the plowman. The schoolman 
became a pamphleteer. 



342 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Already had he regarded the papal schism of 1378 as a call 
to promote a reformation at home. One pope was too many 
for England ; but two were a shame to the Church. If the 
Pharisees of his time would not listen to him, he would get the 
ear and heart of the people. He had organized a band of 
Bible -readers and preachers, laymen and simple priests, and 
said: "Go, teach; it is the sublimest work. But do not imi- 
tate those priests whom we see, after the service, sitting in 
ale-houses, or at the gambling-tables, or hasting off with their 
hounds. After sermon, visit the sick, the aged, the poor, the 
little children, and help them as you can." These men went 
out barefoot, staff in hand, to live on the hospitality of the 
lay -folk — and they had it — and to gather the people in cot- 
tages, fields, and woods, and tell them of ' ' Him who went 
about teaching in Galilee." They were his missionaries and 
colporteurs. When he was an example to them at Lutter- 
worth, he enlarged this agency, intent upon having the glad 
tidings borne into the remotest hamlets and lowliest homes. 

The clergy, who had driven his reform from the high places 
of the nation, were alarmed lest it should work up from the 
lower strata of society and reach the ruling classes. Woe to 
them if it did. They secured a letter from King Richard order- 
ing every royal officer to arrest the preachers and their hearers. 
But this did not check the work. It extended to the monks, 
the citizens, the nobles. The fiery Courtenay, now archbishop, 
had his doctrine arraigned on twenty-four propositions drawn 
from Wyclif's writings, to show that they were full of heresy, 
sacrilege, impiety, and rebellion. His synod met in the house 
of the Black Frlfcrs in London (1382), but they had no Domin- 
ican machinery for torturing heretics. England would not yet 
allow it. An earthquake shook the city. The prelates were 
terrified, except Courtenay, who held them together by a stroke 
of wit, saying, "The earth is throwing off its noxious vapors 
to teach us to expel all ill humors from the Church." The 
doctrines were condemned, Wyclif not being present, for he 
probably had received his first attack of palsy. When he heard 
the result of this "earthquake council," what most pained him 
were the severe measures against his preachers, and the new 
union between the bishops and the friars, who had been at war 
since Grossetete's time. "Pilate and Herod are made friends 



WYCLIF'S BIBLE. 343 

to-day," said he, bitterly. "As they have made a heretic of 
Christ, they can easily infer that simple Christians are heretics." 

7. Wyclifs Bible was the first English vei'sion of tlie entire 
volume. The Latin Vulgate was translated; the Old Testament 
mainly by his co-laborer, Nicholas Hereford, and most, if not 
all, of the New Testament by Wyclif. The learned Lollard, 
John Purvey, either retouched this version or made a new one. 
The first effort to repress Wyclifs Bible failed. The young 
queen, Anne of Bohemia, was praised by Archbishop Arundel 
for reading the Gospels in English, while he insisted that all 
versions must be submitted to the bishops for approval. The 
chronicler, Knighton, tells how the clergy generally felt. 
"Christ gave the Gospel to the clergy and doctors of the 
Church that they might administer it gently to laymen and 
weaker persons, according to their needs ; but this Master John 
Wylif has translated it into the Anglic — not angelic — tongue, 
and made it vulgar and more open to the laity and to women 
than it usually is to the lettered clerks; and so the jewel is 
made the sport of the people." What sort of sport was it for 
the people to prize it, read it, believe it, hide it when their 
houses were searched, and be willing to die for it when arrested? 
After the year 1400 they were in peril, for the first fruit of the 
revolution which placed Henry IV, of Lancaster, on the throne 
(1399-1413) was the law for burning heretics, and for two hun- 
dred years it disgraced the English code. When Arundel and 
his council forbade any one on his own authority to make 
versions of the Bible or read them, on pain of excommuni- 
cation, John of Gaunt was roused to say: "Are we then the 
very dregs of humanity, that we can not have the laws of our 
religion in our own tongue?" In the face of prohibitions num- 
berless copies of Wyclifs Bible were made, widely circulated, 
and handed down by the Lollards. 

8. Wyclifs last word to the pope. English prelates urged, 
and Urban VI ordered, him to appear before the papal court at 
Rome. He was too ill to go, but there was no palsy of his 
irony when he replied : "I am always glad to explain my faith 
to any one, and, above all, to the Bishop of Rome ; for I take 
it for granted that if it be orthodox he will confirm it; if erro- 
neous, he will correct it. I assume too that, as chief vicar of 
Christ upon earth, he is of all mortal men most bound to the 



344 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

law of Christ's Gospel, for among the disciples of Christ a 
majority is not reckoned by simply counting heads in the 
fashion of this world, but according to the imitation of Christ 
on either side. Now Christ, during his life upon earth, was of 
all men the poorest, casting from him all worldly authority. I 
infer, then, that the pope should surrender all temporal author- 
ity to the civil power, and advise the clergy to do the same." 
One fact shows that the bold doctor had not formally left the 
Roman Church; in 1384 he was celebrating mass (in some 
modified form) in his parish church, when paralysis returned, 
and the next day he quietly went to his eternal rest. 

We left some of his preachers in the hands of Courtenay at 
"the earthquake council." He grew fierce upon Oxford as the 
fount and center of the new heresies. Its chancellor sought to 
protect such men as Nicholas Hereford and Repington so long 
as John of Gaunt was their supporter. But John was afraid of 
Lollardism. Some of them recanted, others fled to remoter 
corners. The result was that "within Oxford itself the sup- 
pression of Lollardism was complete, but with the death of 
religious freedom all trace of intellectual life suddenly disap- 
peared. The century which followed the triumphs of Courtenay 
is the most barren in its annals, nor was the sleep of the uni- 
versity broken till the advent of the new learning restored to it 
some of the life and liberty which the primate had so roughly 
trodden out." The friars were again in power. 

But the followers of "Wyclif's learning" sprang up almost 
every-where. Among them were a few monks at some old 
convent reading, " How Antichrist and his clerks [clergy] travail 
to destroy Holy Writ," and whispering that Wyclif did well to 
write it ; the sturdy leather-clad rustic walking into town to get 
the "Poor Caitiff" which was written for simple folk; and 
such a knight as Sir John Oldcastle, whom Shakespeare first 
misunderstood and caricatured as others had done, in his plays. 
The good-humored poet repaired the error by putting Sir John 
Falstaff in the drama, and saying that ' ' Oldcastle died a mar- 
tyr." He also seems to have written of Oldcastle: 

"It is no pampered glutton we present, 
Nor aged councilor to youthful sin; 
But one whose virtue shone above the rest, 
A valiant martyr and a virtuous peer." 



GOOD LORD COBHAM. 345 

To explain how such a change came in literature would 
involve nearly the entire history of Lollardism from Wyclif to 
Latimer. It was the religion not of the Churches, but of the 
home, the cottage, the castle, the conventicle, the hearts of 
numberless people. "They every- where filled the kingdom," 
says a chronicler, "so that if you met two men on the road 
you might be sure that one of them was a Wyclifite." They 
were denounced in synods, they were ridiculed on the stage, 
they were burnt at the stake, as was William Sawtre (1401) the 
first, though not the staunchest, of modern English martyrs. 
That same year the shoemaker, John Badby, showed a more 
heroic faith in his death. The priest, William Thorpe, wrote 
out his excellent confession, which reads well to-day, and died 
for it. Among the unnamed crowd of Lollard martyrs was one 
who suffered, "because that he said God's body might not be 
ground in a mill, and kept counsel in huyding of Lollard's 
boks." The mass was the test. It was the one theme of the 
priests who were stirred up to do more preaching in their igno- 
rant way. Some yeoman would say to them: "John Bates of 
Bristol has as much power and authority to make the like body 
of Christ as any of you have." An uncultured man was burnt 
for saying: "If every consecrated host be the Lord's body 
there are twenty thousand gods in England." If men spoke 
thus irreverently the mass-priests were to blame. The Lollards 
were doubtless largely Saxon, and the Saxon mode of argument 
made short work of scholastic logic. 

At Cowling Castle, near Rochester, Sir John Oldcastle, "the 
good Lord Cobham," had pored over Wyclif 's writings (for 
they had won him to a sober life), and he was widely known as 
"a mighty maintainer of suspected preachers in the dioceses of 
London, Rochester, and Hereford, contrary to the ordinances 
of the Church." For this offense all his services to society 
and the state must be forgotten, and he must be falsely charged 
with treason, and justly with heresy, if it was heresy, to reject 
the mass, and to say to his inquisitors, when they asked him 
what he thought of the pope, "He and ye together make up 
the great antichrist; he the head, ye the body, and the friars 
the tail;" or to say, "I wot well that our salvation came, not 
by that wooden cross which ye press me to worship, but by 
Him alone who died thereon." It appears that he had copies 



346 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

made of Wyclif 's writings, and sent them, with other books — two 
hundred volumes — to John Huss, at Prague. After the council 
of Constance had burnt Huss, it was refreshed with the news 
that the good Lord Cobham, once the bosom friend of his king, 
had been hung in chains and roasted alive on Christmas day, 
141 7, as a sacrifice to the bigotry of the Church. It had already 
denounced Wyclif and ordered his bones to be dug up and 
burnt. Bishop Fleming, once an ardent Wyclifite, and now the 
successor of Grossetete, performed the inhuman act, and threw 
the ashes into the Swift, which falls into the Avon. Strong as 
was the resurge of opinion, men came to find in that deed a 
symbol of final triumph : 

The Avon to the Severn runs, 
The Severn to the sea; 
And far as ocean throws her waves 
On lands of chapels and of graves 
Shall Wyclif's doctrine be.* 

Archbishop Chichele could promote learning by founding 
All Souls' College at Oxford, and, in 141 6, enjoin upon the 
clergy a thorough search in every parish twice a year, for all 
persons that "hold any either heresies or errors, or have any 
suspected books in the English tongue," or harbor any heretics. 
From the terrors of such inquisitions the civil War of the 
Roses (1450-7 1 ),f was a relief to the Lollards "for the storm 
was their shelter." The amiable but unheroic bishop, Reginald 
Pecocke, insisted that reasonable argument and Holy Scripture 
would secure more unity of belief than "fire, sword, and hang- 
ment." He was deposed in 1457; three manuscript folios and 
four quartos of his writings were burnt instead of the bishop, 
and he was confined for life in Thornton Abbey, for being sus- 
pected of loving his Bible more than his Church. The more 
peaceful times allowed Henry VII to attend to the Lollards 
with excessive cruelty. An aged priest abjured all heresy, and 
yet was burnt. Joan Boughton, eighty years old, was burnt at 



* It is said that the earliest Polish poem extant (except a hymn to the 
Virgin) is one in praise of Wyclif, closing thus: "O Christ, for the sake of thy 
wounds, send us such priests as may guide us towards the truth." — On the 
Lollards in Scotland see Note I. 

|Red Rose, Lancaster, had kings, Henry IV, 1399-1413 ; V, 1422; VI, 
1471. White Rose, York, had kings, Edward IV, 1471-84; and Richard III, 
1484-5. House of Tudor, Henry VII, 1485-1509. 



FORERUNNERS OF HUSS. 347 

Smithfield (1498), and the faithful collected her ashes by night 
as sacred memorials of her faith. The only daughter of Tyls- 
worth was compelled to kindle the flames at the stake to which 
her father was bound for martyrdom, and sixty persons were 
degraded or branded at the same time. However much Wyc- 
lifs following decreased, so-called heresies kept the Lollard's 
Tower, the jails and the fires in demand until the great 
Reformation brought relief. 

II. John Huss and Unitas Fratrum. 

There w r ere great and good men in Bohemia and Moravia 
before John Huss. The Church in that whole country had not 
become so entirely Latinized as in the West. There had long 
been people who did not think that the nation should have one 
language and the Church another; that the parishioner who used 
his mother-tongue in telling the priest how common life went 
with him at home, must be told in Latin how eternal life 
might be secured in heaven. They cherished the Slavonic 
Bible which Cyril had left to their race, and seem to have 
revised it. They won two victories over Latinism in the Church 
and Germanism in the state, when they gained an archbishop 
at Prague, and civil judges in the country who would speak 
and favor their mother-tongue. They learned good doctrine 
from the Waldensians who settled in their towns. They sang 
popular hymns. They saw their University of Prague, founded 
in 1348, holding fair rivalry with Paris and Oxford. 

The reformatory movement in Bohemia began before Wyclif 
struck a light in England or Huss drew water from the wells 
of salvation. When Huss was standing by the graves of his 
predecessors in Biblical knowledge and reform he thankfully 
recalled the names of "Adelbert, the flowing orator; Colin, 
the devoted patriot ; John Steikna, the noble preacher, whose 
voice was like the blast of a trumpet ; Peter Stupna, the sweet- 
est singer and most glowing preacher;" and the layman 
Thomas Stitny, a knight in patriotism, a true philosopher, an 
author, and translator, who gave many a good book to his 
countrymen. Nor were these alone. Three other reformers 
are famous. 

Conrad Waldhauser, a preacher at Vienna, was in Rome 
the year of the Black Death (1348), when a million pilgrims are 



348 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

said to have been there seeking salvation through indulgences, 
donations, and papal machinery. He saw and heard and 
opened his eyes. He went back a preacher of repentance, 
traveling through all Austria, and lingering at Prague, where 
the churches were overcrowded, and immense audiences gath- 
ered in the market-place to hear him scathe the prevalent 
vices, and warn the people of the wrath to come. Many Jews 
listened to his sermons. A social change was working. In 
1364, the Dominicans and Franciscans accused him of dis- 
turbing the public peace. "So Christ was accused," said he, 
and he had his Bible in hand to prove it. They framed 
twenty-nine charges against him, but on the day of trial not a 
man dared to prosecute them. 

A still more effective reformer was John Milicz, a Mo- 
ravian, who studied at Prague and Paris, and became well 
versed in theology, canon law, and history. He was struck 
with the fact that the ancient Church of his native land had 
few of the modern innovations. She was now burdened and 
blind. He began his work. He was cathedral preacher at 
Prague, but his soul and tongue were not free. He gave up 
the rich place, and went on as the Lord led him, through many 
a struggle and with many a triumph for the Word of God. 
Too much of a monk for us, he was a holy example to the 
friars of his time. He preached in the different churches twice 
every Sunday, and often four or five times on other days to 
the students in Latin and German, and to the public in their 
own language, "with a mighty and powerful voice." A ser- 
mon two or three hours in length was all the better. He 
was the forerunner of city missionaries. He led twenty aban- 
doned women to reform their vile manners, secured a house for 
them, enlisted the devout women in behalf of their class, and 
hundreds were reclaimed. "Little Venice" was so purified that 
it was called "Little Jerusalem." The whole city bore the face 
of a transformation. He went to Rome to see the pope, but 
Urban VI was absent. He posted on the door of St. Peter's 
these words, ' ' The Antichrist is come ; he has his seat in the 
church." The Franciscans threw him into prison. There he 
wrote his famous book on "Antichrist," which popes might 
wisely read. When free again he founded a theological school 
at Prague. He taught more than two hundred young men, 



john huss. 349 

helped them to copy good books, and sent them out to 
preach and use the liturgy compiled for them. He became the 
pastor at Teyn, where Conrad had last labored and died, and 
there he ended his useful life (1374)- Among their followers 
was Matthias of Janow, who exceeded them in scholarship and 
radical ideas of reform. No other man of his day saw more 
clearly what Christendom needed, or more fully knew the di- 
vine Word and illustrated its spirit. " Unless the crucified 
Jesus had come to my rescue, as my most faithful and loving 
Savior, my soul would have perished." In one of his tracts he 
says, "The Antichrist has come. He is neither Jew, pagan, 
Saracen, nor worldly tyrant, but the man who opposes Chris- 
tian truth and the Christian life, assuming the highest station 
in the Church, and arrogating dominion over all ecclesiastics 
and laymen." In his view "a securalized hierarchy was Anti- 
christ embodied." The wonder is that he was not severely 
persecuted. His writings had a great influence upon Huss, and 
copies were burnt along with those of Wyclif. 

John Huss, of Hussinitz, began life about 1370, as the son 
of poor peasants, who were careful to rear him in the best 
knowledge of the Christian home and the village schools. 
"Meanly born, but of no mean spirit," said his later enemies 
who had watched his whole course in the University of Prague, 
"he was more acute than eloquent; his modesty, self denial, 
austerity, pale and thin face, sweet temper, gentleness to all, 
even the humblest, were of more force than words." At the 
age of thirty he began to find honors and duties crowding 
upon him. He was lecturer in philosophy, confessor to the 
queen, court-preacher, and very soon dean of the theological 
faculty at Prague, where students gathered by the thousand. 
We shall notice what is most peculiar in his life. 

I. The conflict of opinions. Their sources were in the 
Church of his time, the examples and writings of his reforma- 
tory predecessors, the Holy Scriptures, which he closely 
studied, the Fathers, and the writings of John Wyclif. What 
is truth? was the pressing question. He read Augustine. He 
quoted Robert Grossetete. He accepted what was vital in 
Matthias of Janow. But what of Wyclif s writings? Ever 
since the Bohemian attendants of Queen Anne of England 
had returned, his books had been circulating in quiet corners. 



350 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

It was the custom for students and scholars to wander from one 
university to another, and thus ventilate ideas. Among these 
literary knights-errant was Jerome of Prague, older than Huss, 
and as zealous for knowledge. Returning from Oxford, in 
1398, he opened his packages of new books, and in his enthu- 
siastic way showed one of them to Master Huss, who looked 
into it and said, ''Unsound, heretical, burn it, or fling it into 
the Moldau, lest it fall into the hands of some freethinker." 
Jerome was not the man to burn or drown a volume which he 
had taken the pains to copy. More books came; more readers 
eagerly caught them up. The Bohemians liked their realism ; 
the Germans wanted nothing but nominalism ;* and so the de- 
bates began. In 1403 the faculties and scholars of the univer- 
sity gravely condemned the books, and forbade them to be read 
by all who had not taken the degree of Master of Arts. Huss 
was almost alone in opposing this sentence. He, as a master, 
could read them. He declares, "I often allow myself to be 
set right by my own scholars," and we may hope well of him. 

2. As court-preacher Huss ministered in the Bethlehem 
chapel, which had been built as a model of architecture, and a 
means of popular instruction. It was a monument to the 
labors of Conrad and Milicz. Sermons and prayers, but not 
the mass and confessional, were the main things there. On 
rites, ceremonies, and sacraments the preacher need not com- 
mit himself. That pulpit was the fortress and tower of Huss 
for twelve years. There he uttered the doctrines into which he 
grew. More and more boldly he declared what he understood 
to be the teachings of the Bible. He spoke in the language of 
the people and to their hearts. The large room was crowded 
by those who came to be "refreshed by the bread of holy 
preaching." At length he said to some friends: "I am drawn 
to Wyclif by the reputation he enjoys with the good, not the 
bad, priests at Oxford, and generally with the people. Covet- 
ous, pomp-loving, dissipated prelates and priests do not like 
him. I am attracted to his writings, for all his efforts are to 
lead men back to the law of Christ." 

A public test was made of Huss in a curious way. Two 
Englishmen, James and Conrad, appeared in the University of 

*The Realists and Nominalists were quarreling in all the universities, and 
the war of words seemed likely to be one of swords. 



A BOHEMIAN VICTORY. 35 I 

Prague, discussing the timely questions about the pope and the 
mass. They were silencep!, but they retained their wits. On 
the inner walls of their lodging-house, in the suburbs, they 
painted two pictures; one representing our Lord and his bare- 
foot disciples entering Jerusalem in all humility ; the other, the 
pope riding a splendid horse covered with jeweled trappings, 
and followed by gorgeously robed cardinals and soldiers, all 
parading in Rome to the beat of drums and the wonder of 
ragged children. People crowded to see this pictured sermon, 
and wished to know what preacher Huss thought of it. He 
commended it from his pulpit as showing the contrast between 
Christ and Antichrist. 

3. A Bohemian victory. The Germans had control of the uni- 
versity, for their three "nations," or nationalities represented, 
had each a vote. The Bohemian nation had but one vote. The 
Germans opposed the Wyclifite doctrines; the Bohemians cared 
less for Wyclif than for their realism and for their right to con- 
trol a university in their own country. It was a long and 
complicated strife, and evoked all the patriotism of the land. 
The pope, Gregory, and the bishops said that no one should 
teach or hold the doctrines of Wyclif in the university, and the 
Germans were happy. But King Wenzel, who cared more for 
a wine-cask than for the papacy, said: "Gregory is not our 
pope; we recognize Alexander."* He declared that the Ger- 
mans should have but one vote. The crisis came, when a new 
rector was to be chosen. Every Bohemian voice and vote went 
for Huss, who had heroically shown his patriotism in the con- 
test. The Germans withdrew — probably five thousand of them — 
and in 1409 founded the University of Leipsic. They must have 
left an equal number in Prague. 

4. The opposition to Huss. Archbishop Sbynco had found 
his own power waning. He complained to the king of certain 
scathing rebukes that fell upon the clergy. Wenzel was amused 
and replied: "So long as Master Huss preached against us of 
the laity you were much pleased ; your turn has now come and 
you had better keep quiet and bear it." An old chronicler 
says: "While Huss rebuked the vices of the laity he was only 
praised. Men said the spirit of God moved him. But when 
he assailed the vices of the pope and clergy, exposing their 

* They were rivals for the chair at Rome, which caused a small schism. 



352 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

avarice and simony, the whole priesthood rose up declaring: 
'He is an incarnate devil — a heretic !' " The archbishop at first 
failed to have a general book-burning, but his efforts brought 
to Prague a papal bull to thrust Huss out of Bethlehem Chapel. 
He did not heed it. Another papal bull excommunicated him, 
but he went on preaching. Then the city was declared to be 
under an interdict. No priest should perform any religious 
services until Huss was expelled. But he remained, and Sbynco 
left heart-broken and hopeless, soon dying at Presburg. He 
had been too ignorant for a theologian, too vacillating for an 
inquisitor, too contemptible for a bishop. Next came from 
Pope John XXIII, one of the worst of a bad class, a bull whose 
tender mercies were these: "None shall harbor John Huss nor 
give him food and drink nor talk with him. Every city, vil- 
lage, or castle where he shall be is put under interdict." Huss 
was to be seized and Bethlehem chapel leveled to the ground. 
King Wenzel was marvelously cool and shrewd. His order 
was: "All priests who do not go on and fulfill their duties shall 
forfeit their salaries!" This counterworked the papal decrees, 
and the interdict was a failure. But when the victory was 
gained Huss retired into the country. He preached in woods, 
in fields, at cross-roads, and then in towns and cities, to crowds 
of people. The Gospel was planted in numberless hearts and 
homes. His name was stamped upon the popular mind never 
to be effaced. In some of his retreats he wrote some of his 
best books. They show that he was Augustinian in theology, 
and mainly Scriptural in the essentials of faith, except in his 
views of the eucharist, priestly confession, and some sort of 
purgatory. His treatise on the Church drew more sharply the 
lines between parties. His enemies became more bold. 

5. The Council of Constance (1414-18). It was the century 
of reformatory councils which reformed nothing. The Emperor 
Sigismund forced John XXIII to unite with him in calling this 
council, which charged this pope with the most infamous crimes 
and deposed him. It asserted the French doctrine that coun- 
cils were superior to popes. It cited John Huss to appear 
before it. When Jerome saw him ready to go he expressed 
the love and courage of his honest heart by saying: "Dear 
master, be firm. Maintain all you have written. If I hear that 
you are in perils I will fly to your relief." Huss had evidence 



THE BLUSH OF SIGISMUND. 353 

all along his route that the people were generally eager for a 
reformation. At Constance his liberty was gradually taken 
away, until he found himself in the hands of the Dominicans. 
An advocate was denied him. His friends, the noble Knight 
John of Chlum in the lead, found him ill, a mere skeleton, on 
a wretched couch in a monastery, and a slip of paper lying 
near on which were these words : ' ' If you still love me, entreat 
the emperor to allow his people to provide for me, or permit 
me to secure food for myself." He was literally starving. The 
bearded warriors stayed their tears by grasping their swords 
and threatening to avenge this outrage. Jerome had come; 
he was soon in Dominican hands. The trial of these men was 
but a form and farce. Under pressure Sigismund annulled the 
safe- conduct. One would expect to hear a plea for them from 
Jean Gerson, that ''venerable and most Christian doctor," whom 
we shall presently see at Paris, but he seemed to forget that he 
too was a reformer, if not a heretic* At the final hearing, 
when it was useless for Huss to reply to such absurd charges 
as a denial of the Trinity, he said : "I came hither relying on 
the public faith and safe-conduct of the emperor, not to be 
tried, but to give a reason for my faith." He fixed his eyes 
on the emperor, and Sigismund blushed! That historic blush 
we shall find remembered for Luther's good at the Diet of 
Worms, but it w r as red with imperial infamy. On his birth- 
day, July 6, 141 5, Huss calmly heard his sentence. He prayed 
for the pardon of his enemies. The bishops appointed by the 
council stripped him of his priestly garments, and put a miter 
of paper on his head, on which devils were painted, with this 
inscription : A Ringleader of Heretics. His books were burnt at 
the gate of the church, and he was led to the suburbs, to be 
burnt alive. Prior to his execution he made a solemn, public 
appeal to God, from the judgment of the pope and council. 



* When too late Gerson said : "If John Huss had had an advocate he never 
would have been convicted." Gerson found himself charged with heresies sim- 
ilar to those of Wyclif, and if he had not been his own advocate, free to speak 
in the council, the ablest man in France would probably have followed Huss in 
martyrdom. Years later he said: "I would rather have Jews and pogans for 
judges in matters of faith than the deputies of the council." If he had stood 
with Huss on the ground of Scripture and the right of private judgment, if he 
had thus got back of all councils and rested on the sole authority of God, he 
would have acknowledged one of the distinctive principles of Protestantism. 

23 



354 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

When burning amid the fagots he sang a popular hymn, with 
so loud and cheerful a voice, that he was distinctly heard 
through all the noise of the flames and of the multitude. At 
length he uttered: " Jesus Christ, thou Son of the living God, 
have mercy on me!" and he was consumed; after which his 
ashes were carefully collected and thrown into the Rhine. But 
the people of his native land have never forgotten him, though 
most of them now reject his creed. They overlook his heresy ; 
they remember his patriotism. Jerome was at first so panic- 
stricken by the fate of Huss that he abjured the doctrines 
charged against him, but he recovered his hold upon them and 
endured trial and martyrdom so heroically that his enemies 
praised- his eloquence and courage. 

All Prague seemed now to be full of indignant Hussites. 
Had they been united and faithful to their principles Sigismund 
would never have mastered Bohemia. They might have resisted 
the pope. But many of them were politicians rather than 
churchmen. A war of thirteen years threw them into more 
and worse confusion. They divided into two parties. The 
Calixtines, led by Jacobel of Myra, insisted that the cup (calix, 
chalice) should be given to the laity. When certain conces- 
sions were made most of them finally went back into the Church 
of Rome. The Taborites were more radical. They wished all 
Roman rites to be abolished, and to have a Scriptural Church. 
The famous General Ziska, afterwards the blind warrior, led 
them to the neighboring Mount Tabor, which he so fortified 
that later ages took lessons from him in the arts of defensive 
war. But his followers needed discipline. They and the Ca- 
lixtines fell to fighting. When conquered many of them took 
refuge in the mountains on the borders of Moravia. They 
formed the Unitas Fratrum, and have ever since existed as the 
United Brethren or Moravians, an independent Church, famous 
for their system, their purity, and their missionary zeal in all 
lands. The later Reformers highly honored them. John Wes- 
ley took lessons from them, and Methodism has acknowledged 
the debt due to the noblest followers of John Huss. 

III. Gerson and Reform by Councils. 

A reform on the basis of Holy Scripture and the individual 
conscience was the idea of Wyclif and Huss. A reform on the 



GERSON— REFORM BY COUNCILS. 355 

basis of councils was urged by a strong party, especially by 
leaders in the University of Paris. The Cardinal Peter D'Ailly, 
its chancellor (1 396-1425), said that the Bible was the source and 
test of theology. Nicholas of Clemangis (1400-40), the Cicero 
of the colleges, was eloquent against the abuses in the Church. 
He, too, recognized the Word of God as the true rule of faith 
and practice. But towering above them all was John Charlier, 
of Gerson, whom Mosheim calls "the most illustrious ornament 
of his age; a man of extensive influence and authority, whom 
the Council of Constance looked upon as its oracle, the lovers 
of liberty as their patron, and whose memory is yet precious to 
such among the French as are at all zealous to maintain their 
privileges against papal despotism." He was chancellor of the 
University (1425-29), and he often appealed to the Divine 
Word as the only source and rule of Christian faith. He wrote, 
"The Roman court, once spiritual, has become secular, devil- 
ish, tyrannical, worse in manners than any other court." The 
watchword of these men was, ' ' A reform in the head and the 
members of the Church." But they would prune the tree rather 
than renew its life. They held firmly the doctrine of the priest- 
hood, and the dogmatic system, with most of its traditional 
theories. In this was their main difference from Wyclif and 
Huss. They thought that the Church was sick rather than 
fettered ; they would give it medicine rather than strike off its 
shackles. They wished to secure a reform of manners, morals, 
and modes of administration ; not so much a reform of doctrine 
and sacraments. They would distribute, not destroy, the priestly 
power by having councils supreme over popes. Their theory 
was that episcopal power is justly greater than papal. 

The papacy surely needed reforming when it was double- 
headed, and the Church was divided during fifty years (1378— 
1429) in its reverences to the popes at Avignon and those at 
Rome. For a time the University of Paris led the party of 
the Neutrals, and labored to secure unity and reform through 
councils. But the three Councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basle 
were little more than great failures.* If they had unanimously 
sent forth decrees and commands they must have failed, for 

*"If any thing could be done by means of councils, those of the fifteenth 
century, favored as they were by the weakness of the papacy, might have done 
it. But they were of no use, for they confined themselves to combating the 



356 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the people can not be reformed in masses, nor the clergy in a 
body. The reforming power must reach the individual heart 
and conscience. France gained almost the only lasting benefit. 
Her Gallican liberties were confirmed by the renewed "Prag- 
matic Sanction" (1438), the drift of which was that general 
councils are supreme above popes : and that popes should not 
send their priests into French benefices, nor exact tithes at their 
own will. It assumed that there was a National Church in France. 
To this Gerson contributed, though he saw not the result. He 
had assailed the mendicant friars, ' ' the light infantry of the papal 
army," and the great man, with his noble heart and gigantic in- 
tellect, his mystical piety and honesty, became an exile and a 
poor school-master. At Lyons he daily taught little children 
their catechism, asking only this reward, "When you stand at 
my grave, pray that God will have mercy on poor Jean Gerson." 
Still this demand for a purifying council rose louder, and 
popes used every method to hush and evade it. Cardinal An- 
drew was sent to Rome by the German Emperor, on an embassy. 
He was astonished to find no papal sanctity about Sixtus IV 
and his court, but only avarice, luxury, crime, utter abomina- 
tion. He was simple enough to remonstrate and hint something 
about the Gospel. He was mocked and persecuted. In 1482 
he, as an archbishop and cardinal, proclaimed a call for a new 
council at Basle. He wished to rouse the prelates to take the 
matter of reform in their own hands. But this was rebellion 
in papal eyes. He was cast into a prison and there died. Yet 
his inquisitor, Henry Institoris, was not blind, and he said, "All 
the world cries out for a council. But there is no human power 
in a council to reform the Church. The Most High will find 
other means, now unknown to us, though perhaps they are at 
our very doors, to bring back the Church to her pristine condi- 
tion." This word was a star of the morning, shining over the 
very cradle of Luther. 

IV. Brethren of the Common Life. 

Meanwhile another type of the reformatory spirit had been 
manifesting itself in the Rhine-lands. The individual soul, not 

symptoms of evil; they reduced reform to a question of power as between the 
pope and a universal council ; at the very most, they labored for the improve- 
ment of clerical and papal morals." (Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theology, I, 79.) 



MASTER ECKART. 357 

the public council, was the factor in it. The mystic piety of 
St. Bernard — the theology of the heart, the preference of intu- 
ition to logic, the quest of self-knowledge, the seeking after 
God by the light of the feelings and experience — had developed 
in various forms. One of its forerunners was Berthold Lech, 
born about 1225, and the pupil of David of Augsburg, who 
was elated with the successes of the young preacher when he 
traveled with him through Bavaria, Bohemia, and Thuringia. 
Brother Berthold, a Franciscan, exposed the folly of trusting 
in ceremonies, pilgrimages, and indulgences, for salvation. His 
clearness, vivid pictures of nature and common life, practical 
spirit, and sympathy for the poor, brought to him immense au- 
diences. He often led them from closed or over-crowded churches 
to the fields and hill-sides. Monk as he was, he asserted that 
the world was made to be a home for good and happy people, 
and that all the evils in it arose from an abuse of human liberty. 
As a remedy for social wrongs and sufferings he favored a 
distribution of property, though he knew nothing of modern 
communism as a theory. He did not dream of such a follower 
as John of Leyden, when he said, "The gifts of Providence 
ought to be fairly shared; if you have not enough of meat, 
bread, wine, beer, fish, and fowl, it is because some one has 
robbed you of your proper share. The rich must distribute 
them." Such teachings grew bolder for two hundred years. 
They were one cause of the later Peasant Wars,* and of the 
Anabaptist communities, which might have turned the Refor- 
mation into a social revolution, had not wise men directed the 
movement. From the most popular preacher we turn to the 
highest speculative thinker of the thirteenth century. 

Master Eckart, "the father of German speculation," a Do- 
minican overseer at Cologne (1 250-1 328), was charged with 
heresies which he never recanted. He was zealous for the 
reformation of monasteries. In urging men to live above the 
world, and attain the fullness of God's love, he rose to such a 
giddy height that he quite lost the distinction between God and 
man. He had much to say of the presence of God in the 
human soul, and the absorption of the human will in the divine ; 
and he led some of his society — "The Friends of God" — 
almost into pantheism. They were not a sect, but a company, 

*Note V. 



358 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

who devoted themselves to the love of God and of men, and 
were active in all benevolent works. In those lands it was a gen- 
eral custom among the devout people to set apart at least one 
hour each day to meditation on the death of Christ, and the bene- 
fits to be derived from it. Out of this spirit grew many societies 
for spiritual culture. It also gave rise to a new class of preachers. 
John Tauler, a pupil of Eckart, and a learned doctor, drew 
immense numbers of hearers as he went about preaching, with 
an eloquence and spirituality rarely excelled. With Cologne as 
his center he ranged widely for twenty years (to 1361). He is 
one of the first, best, richest prose writers of Germany. De- 
spite his deep mysticism, he taught a practical religion, and 
trenched close upon justification by faith. Christ and his 
words on the cross were favorite themes. He was at Strasburg 
when the city was under an interdict, and the Flagellants were 
bewildering the people while the Black Death was raging. But 
the magistrates bade the priests fulfill their duties or be ban- 
ished. The clergy were divided. Some obeyed the pope, 
others the town council. Here the bells were silent ; there they 
tolled for prayers. Poor, ignorant people were dying under the 
papal ban, merely because of some political offense. Tauler 
cared nothing for such interdicts until he was driven from the 
city. He and his Friends of God went among the people say- 
ing, "God is not in the churches alone: he does not come 
only with the priest : seek him in your homes and hearts. It is 
not the liturgy, nor fasts, nor penance, nor sacrament, nor 
self-scourgings, that surely brings Christ to you ; for you may 
find him in your souls." Men of all ranks came into this sort 
of sympathetic brotherhood. A cottage, a castle, a convent, 
became the center for these devout "friends," who had 
their preachers and prophetesses. Rich men gave largely to 
them. Schools were formed, and new communities, in which 
there was "a common life," not in the form of the grosser 
communism of social infidelity, but a modified conventism. 
Women had nunneries ; men had monasteries ; and in these 
grew up a religious and literary culture. Tauler visited John of 
Ruysbroek, an Augustinian monk, who had his famous convent 
near Brussels. Hundreds went to learn from this "ecstatic 
doctor" how to keep their souls in a state of ecstasy, or fer- 
vent love to God. 



JOHN TAULER. 359 

"The meditative men of the times, the Mystics, knew that 
the world around them required a renovation, not external, but 
spiritual and deep, and that this renovation must take place, 
first of all, in the reformer's own mind. So they retired from 
the strife of society to find, or to make peace, in the world 
of their own thoughts." Tauler said, " One thought of God, 
attended with absolute resignation to his will, is worth more 
than all the good works done in Christendom." By such resig- 
nation Christ is born in the human soul. By the inner silent 
self-sacrifice of the soul, which no good works or words can 
fully express, comes eternal life with God. "Dear soul, sink 
into the abyss of thine own nothingness, and no power can 
crush thee." Thus Christianity had its root in the consciousness 
of devout men, and not in scholastic theology, nor in mechan- 
ical churchism.* 

Some unknown man like Tauler wrote the "Theologia Ger- 
manica, " which Luther edited in 1516, saying that, next to the 
Bible and St. Augustine, he had learned from it more true 
religion than from any other book. It is colored, or clouded, 
by the mysticism which so blended the work of Christ for us 
with his work in us that sanctification and communion with 
God were made the condition of justification ; the inner life 
was a means of faith, rather than a result of it. Luther was 
the first man to dispel this mysticism. 

Gerhard Groot (the Great, 1384) preached with marked 
effect at Leyden, Delft, and Amsterdam. The people left their 
meals to hear him in the streets. He founded the Society of 
the Common Life at Deventer. It became the center of many 
similar institutions in the north of Europe. Clergy and laity 
entered them, with no formal vows or rules, and by their schools 
and sermons they had a vast influence for the good of the 
people. They promoted the copying of manuscripts and the 
circulation of the Bible. Gerhard of Zutphen insisted on the 
reading of God's Word in the vernacular, and its importance 
in preaching and in religious life. One of the noblest sons of 

*By urging that every thing historically or externally true in religion must 
be conceived in the soul and realized in the experience before it can become 
spiritually true, the Mystics were forerunners of Schleiermacher (1825), whose 
work was very similar in evoking the religious consciousness of men. They and 
he, in different ages, helped greatly to clear the way for a restoration of the 
Christian faith and life in Germany. 



360 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Deventer was Thomas a Kempis (1380-147 1), to whom is com- 
monly ascribed the best of all the many books on the "Imita- 
tion of Christ." It has long been circulated almost as widely 
as the Bible. It met a want ; it was the fruitage of a growing 
idea. Tauler's best book had been upon "The Imitation of the 
Poor Life of Christ." The idea was that every soul might 
come personally to a living, loving Savior, without the help of 
priest or ritual ; that Christ, and not the Church, was the 
source and center of all spiritual life. Thoughtful men and 
women were prompted, by every such book, to cultivate per- 
sonal piety. They may have tended too much to a spirit of 
self-reliance ; but this was better than a slavish dependence on 
the clergy when the clergy was not a ministry to the soul, but 
stood as a medium of grace. The influence of Thomas was 
felt by John Wessel (1 420-1489), the fine scholar, the " Bibli- 
cus " and "lux mundi, " who taught in various cities, and gave 
a powerful impetus to Scriptural learning.* He was one of the 
first Germans who turned the revival of classical culture upon 
Biblical studies, and some of the results are seen in John 
Reuchlin and Erasmus. His work on theology was fresh, 
vigorous, and so advanced in doctrine that Luther said, "If I 
had read Wessel before I began my work, my opponents would 
say that I had borrowed every thing from him, so nearly do we 
agree in spirit." Luther was profited by another similar name, 
John Burchard of Wesel, a professor at Erfurt, and then 
preacher at Mayence and Worms. His opposition to the 
papacy was so strong that the Dominicans imprisoned him for 
life (1481). He had said, "I despise the pope, the Church, 
and the councils, and I give Christ the glory." In this same, 
quarter was reared John Staupitz, the first spiritual guide 
of Luther. 

Among the many Johns was John of Goch (1460), who 
labored quietly among the many associations of devoted work- 
ers at Mechlin, and taught that "it is not merit of our works 
which makes us heirs of the kingdom of heaven, but the being 

* It is said that when Pope Sixtus IV asked him to choose a gift, he selected 
from the Vatican library a Bible in the original tongues. "Why not prefer a 
bishopric?" asked the pope, laughingly. "Because I do not need such things." 
In 1447 the Elector Philip invited him to Heidelberg; its theological faculty 
would not admit him as a member because he would not accept the tonsure in 
order to be a doctor, but he lectured on philosophy in the university. 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 36 1 

spiritually born of God ; and that Christ has merited for us by 
his death. The merit of Christ is transferred to us by the 
appropriation and imitation of his love." Thus we have 
merely glanced at a class of devout men in the Rhine coun- 
tries, who did no little to keep alive the coals of Biblical 
study and piety; to promote human sympathy and benefi- 
cence ; to reform the morals of the people ; to liberate minds 
from an icy scholasticism and from priestly mediation ; to 
call men away from a dogmatic to a spiritual religion ; to 
break the fetters of ritualism ; and to prepare the way for a 
greater reformation. 

How many hundreds were more quietly sighing for the light 
we can not know. Here and there a voice is heard like that 
of the monk Arnoldi : "O Lord Jesus Christ, I believe that 
in thee alone I have redemption and righteousness." And 
there comes up a name like that of Bishop Christopher, at 
Basle, whose motto was, "My hope is Christ's cross; I seek 
grace, not works." In the same city, when some men were 
pulling down an old Carthusian convent in 1776, a box was 
found hidden in the wall. It had held brother Martin's con- 
fession for more than three hundred years: " Most Merciful 
God, I know that I can not be saved and satisfy thy righteous- 
ness except by the merits and death of thy dear son. Holy 
Jesus, all my salvation is in thy hands." The very fact that 
he dared not confess this openly tells loudly against his con- 
vent, his Church, and his age. 

V. The Revival of Learning. 

The human mind needed breadth as well as intensity ; not 
merely faith, but a knowledge of it ; not anchorage alone, but 
the commerce of all truth. The Church had carried her creed 
through the Middle Ages ; but had narrow ideas of it, if she 
knew at all what it was. It had been run into the triple 
grooves of logic, and given over to the Thomists and Scotists 
for controversial purposes. The merely logical development 
of theology was at an end ; any further advance must come by 
Scripture, and by a different sort of learning. Men needed to 
be brought out of Latinism and cold dialectics, or they would 
never emerge from Romanism. They needed a culture which 
would bring them to understand their creed, to throw off the 



362. HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

errors that had gathered around it and grown over it, and to 
affirm more clearly those doctrines which the Fathers had 
scarcely stated. Until there should be a revival of learning, 
there could be no Augsburg Confession, no Calvin's Institutes, 
no Thirty-nine Articles, no renewed and deeper study of the 
Word of God. The early Church had not understood the 
Holy Scriptures in all their breadth and depth, nor has the 
Church of any age exhausted them. An advance in Biblical 
study was the only hope for a reform in the Church. What 
secured this? What released men from barbarous Latin and 
scholastic jargon? What led them to fling aside the "Sen- 
tences" and "Summas," and study the Hebrew and Greek 
literature, at the risk of being called heretics? When America 
was discovered (1492) all men were astounded, and many 
rushed into the new world for gold. But to studious minds an 
old world of golden literature had been so newly disclosed that 
they became the most ardent seekers for the treasures of knowl- 
edge. This literary renaissance marks one of the great epochs 
of history. It was "hardly less than a second birth of the hu- 
man mind." It was one of the great providences of God in 
behalf of his Church. It had three stages of progress : 

1. The first literary awakening was in Italy, where the traces 
of the ancient civilization had never entirely disappeared. The 
break from slumber may be seen in the life and times of Dante 
(1265-1321), who grew up at Florence under the influence of 
Brunetto, the statesman, scholar, and poet ; studied philosophy 
at Bologna, and theology at Paris ; became the greatest of the 
Italian poets, and made his "Divina Comedia " a storehouse 
of the doctrinal opinions then held, and a portrait-gallery of the 
eminent men of the Church, past and present. The corruptions 
of the age are boldly set forth. The book was just the sort to 
incite men to read the classics, history, theology, and every 
thing else procurable. It marked the revival of genius, the 
effects of classical learning upon it, and its freedom from 
slavery to the papacy. Petrarch is more bold ; he is even fierce 
upon the papal court; and Boccaccio is coarse in his ridicule 
of the common priests. In England native genius shot up with 
Chaucer, Gower, and Wyclif, who knew very little of the Greek 
language and literature. Two Greeks gave a fresh impetus to 
these classic studies : Chrysoloras, who taught at Florence, and 



FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 363 

Bessarion, the Bishop of Nice, who saw the failure of an 
attempt to unite the Greek and Latin Churches, entered the 
Roman body, became a cardinal, and might have been elected 
pope if he had not been so devoted to the Platonic philosophy. 
The new art of printing prepared men for another advance in 
literary culture. 

2. The Turks seized Constantinople in 1453, and ended the 
Grseco-Roman Empire. The Greek scholars of the East became 
exiles in the West, teaching for a livelihood, and calling atten- 
tion to the manuscripts which they had brought with them. 
Chalcondyles became a Greek professor at Florence, and in 
that school were some young Englishmen, William Grocin and 
Thomas Linacre, who bore their new treasures to Oxford. 
John Lascaris brought some two hundred manuscripts from 
Mount Athos, and taught Greek at Paris. These are but spec- 
imens of a class. The new learning required scholars to teach 
it, and places of instruction. The monastic schools were 
inadequate. 

3. The universities. "In the history of human things 
there is to be found no grander conception than that of the 
fifteenth century, when it resolved, in the shape of the univer- 
sities, to cast the light of knowledge abroad over all the Chris- 
tian world. . . . Every thing about them was on a scale 
of liberality, splendor, and good taste sufficient to adjust them 
to the habits of the aristocracy. Yet the poorest and humblest 
of the people — the children of craftsmen and serfs — were 
tempted to resort to them and partake of their munificence." * 
The effort was to make them all equal in facilities of education, 
whether they were in wealthy cities or in the poor town of a 
rude people. That of Aberdeen, for "the wild Scots of the 
North," or of Greifswald, for the half-tamed Prussians, sought 
equality with those of Paris and Bologna. It was no dull age 
that gave sixty universities to Europe. They were no small 
preparation for the great revival of Christianity. 

4. The next step was to collect other manuscripts, collate 
and edit them, print them, and create a book -trade. Men 
ransacked the convents for them. They brought them out of 
the dust of old garrets. Happy was the man who had the 
rarest copy. Princes became the cultivators and liberal patrons 

* Burton; History of Scotland, III, p. 402. See Note IV to this chapter. 



364 



HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



of literature. For example, the Medici at Florence. Cosmo 
had his agents to collect manuscripts of such writers as Homer, 
Herodotus, Xenophon, and Plato, and the famous Romans. 
He sent a copy of Livy to the king of Naples and thus healed 
an old quarrel. By loaning money to Edward IV the white 
rose of England, he was unwittingly aiding the Wyclifites. 
Lorenzo de Medici, "the Magnificent," held rank, with fine 
scholars and freethinking poets. He made his palace a gal- 
lery of art, and in his gardens sought to revive the academy of 
ancient Greece. We shall again notice him and his son John, 
who became Pope Leo X, with whom Luther had his contest. 
Literature almost paganized them. 

If art ran to Grecian mythology and legendary Madonnas, 
it had its fairer Christian side. If it tended to materialize Chris- 
tianity at Florence, it conveyed some spiritual lessons at Milan. 
There Pietro Sacchi repeated Anselm's theology, when he painted 
the Crucifixion and wrote on the canvas these words from the 
Cur Deus Homo : the Father is saying to the sinner, ' ' Take my 
Son and give him for thee;" the Son is urging, "Lift me and 
redeem thyself." It was a protest against the whole Roman 
scheme of salvation. A silent protest against the mass was 
read in the Milanese convent where Leonardi da Vinci — 
a poet, musician, sculptor, engineer, architect — painted the 
Last Supper, so nearly to life, that it is still regarded as "the 
finest and sublimest composition ever produced by an Italian 
master." 

It was the era of the great printers, when such found- 
ers of printing-houses as Aldus of Venice, Operin at Basle, 
Crispin at Geneva, Robert Stephens at Paris, and Caxton in 
lAndon, were likely to be scholars, editors, and authors. The 
earliest complete book, known to have been printed on metal 
types is the Latin Vulgate (about 1455), from the press of 
John Fust, who had probably cheated Gutenberg out of his 
grand invention. Within fifty years after that date an astonish- 
ing number of books was sent out into the world. * One of the 
noblest undertakings was the polyglot Bible edited by Cardinal 
Ximenes at Complutum, in Spain. Its last volume was issued 
the year of Luther's theses (15 17). The Jews were active in 
publishing the Old Testament. Translations of the Bible in 

* Note II. 



MACHIAVELLI. 365 

various languages were printed. The publication of the Church 
Fathers was begun ; a work which would engage Erasmus. 

Theology began to be separated from philosophy, literature, 
and science. Divinity and humanity {humanismus) were the two 
great departments of culture. The first made little real prog- 
ress, except in the acquisition of materials, before Luther's 
time. In Italy, humanism was a pagan renaissance. Its 
scholars assumed to be philosophers. Plato was exalted above 
Paul. The immortality of the soul was questioned ; the Coun- 
cil of Lateran found it necessary to reaffirm the doctrine. Leo 
X is charged with skepticism, and yet he morally reformed the 
papacy.* This school produced Machiavelli, who wrote to a 
friend, "I wish these Medici would employ me, were it only in 
rolling a stone. They ought not to doubt my fidelity. My 
poverty is a proof of it." He doubtless wrote his " Prince" 
to set forth the political maxims of the Medici, and commend 
himself to them. The book was not a satire, nor a warning to 
the people. It coolly set at defiance all principles of Christian 
morality in the government of a state. Yet two popes virtually 
indorsed its leading doctrine that the end justifies the means. 
This revival of heathenism in Italy carried with it religious 
laxity, moral frivolity, and licentiousness. The old corn was 
converted iuto alcohol rather than bread. 

Yet there were noble exceptions. Laurentius Valla went 
from classic to Christian Greek. He wrote notes upon the 
New Testament. Erasmus edited them. He pointed out 
errors in the Latin Vulgate. He exposed such frauds as "the 
donation of Constantine." He denied that the "Apostles' 
Creed" was written by the apostles, and asserted that the cat- 
egories of Aristotle were not equal to the Ten Command- 
ments. He rebuked the ambition of the papacy. Before 
the Inquisition he made some sort of retraction. In 1465, 
he died as the papal secretary. He is regarded as the restorer 
of Latin literature. But the wonder of his age was John Pico, 
prince of Mirandola, in whom the revived learning blossomed 
out prodigiously. After studying at several universities he 
appeared in Rome with the boldness of an Abelard. This 
knight of twenty-three years challenged all scholars, of every 
sort, by posting up nine hundred theses "on every thing that 

*Note II. 



366 



HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



can be known," and ranging through logic, philosophy, the- 
ology, ethics, metaphysics, mathematics, natural magic, and 
cabalism ; the discussions requiring some skill in the Latin, 
Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic languages. He offered to pay the 
expenses of all opponents who should come from a distance. 
Probably he was acquiring more universal learning than any 
other man of his time, but the broad stream was not deep. 
Upon it floated some drift-wood which the pope's committee 
called heresy. He submitted to the Church, tore down his 
theses, went to Florence, began to write upon nearly every 
thing, and gave temperate literary suppers to Politian, the fine 
Latinist, and Professor Ficino, the half-pagan author of the 
"Platonic Theology." Out of this whirlpool of skepticism he 
was drawn by Jerome Savonarola, the last bold reformatory 
preacher of the fifteenth century. 

VI. Jerome Savonarola. 

This man, once written down as a fanatic, is now proved to 
have been a philosopher. A Dominican writes his life as that 
of a moral, political, and religious reformer whose love of lib- 
erty brought upon him persecution and the crown of martyr- 
dom. Another Roman priest treats his career as "the devel- 
opment of a drama, the most important, the most touching, 
the most sorrowful that is to be found in the history of Italy 
for many centuries." This strange man, so honest, independent, 
pure in life, eloquent in speech, gifted with an insight which 
led to prophetic utterances, "this Luther of Italy" wrote ten- 
der letters to his poor mother while he was a wandering Domin- 
ican monk, saying, "Do not be troubled about me; I wish I 
could comfort you more. I have voluntarily given myself to 
be a slave for the love of Jesus, who for love to me made him- 
self man, and became a slave to set me free. For the love of 
him I am laboring in his vineyard in divers cities ; and that not 
solely for the salvation of my own soul, but for the souls of 
others. He has given me a talent and I must use it as best 
pleases him." Thus he went out from his native Ferrara 
preaching. John Pico told Lorenzo de Medici about him, 
and, as Lorenzo wished to draw every body of importance to 
Florence, Jerome was soon the preacher in the convent and 
church of St. Mark. It was in 1489, and he was in his thirty- 



POWERFUL SERMONS. 367 

seventh year. Not yet was he free from the dryness of scho- 
lastic method, and his blunt manner brought severe criticism 
upon his sermons. Florence evoked his warmth of oratory.. 
There he was at the headquarters of the Renaissance, with art, 
books, classics, scholars, Platonism, and half-heathen preachers 
and poets all around him. Every day he might see young 
Michael Angelo among the statues educating his eye and 
pencil, or hear men jest over the coarse verses of Lorenzo, to 
whom he paid no servile homage ; but amid all that fasci- 
nated stronger minds he stood like a Hebrew prophet, crying 
aloud and sparing not. For he thought that Italy was to be 
terribly chastised for her sins, and that repentance alone could 
stay the outpouring of the Apocalyptic vials of wrath upon 
the earth. Heathenish life w r as increasing in the cities ; the 
pope and cardinals being at the head of it all. He believed 
that God would not much longer endure such outrages upon 
morality, liberty, and society ; and this belief is the key to the 
mysteriousness of the man. A reform in the Church had long 
been an admitted necessity ; it had been attempted in various 
modes. He would try his mode, by uttering the warnings of 
prophesy, and carrying his reform into society, into the state, 
into the politics of the court, and even into the homes of the 
people, so that there might be new laws for dress and dining, 
visiting, and devotion. Voluptuous refinement was smothering 
independence and morality. 

Lorenzo was surprised to find so practical a friar in the 
pulpit. The church was soon too small for the audience. The 
preacher stood near a Damascus rose-tree, and the garden of 
St. Mark was full of people. He brought there the thought, 
the fashion, and the pride of the city. Men who took notes of 
his sermons for the press dropped their pens and wept. Women 
went home to assume a plain attire. A young couple just mar- 
ried strolled into the garden, heard him, parted at the gate, and 
each went into a convent. Foes grasped hands and became 
friends. "The Modern Athens" heard new things. The city 
councilors, elected by the people but set aside by Lorenzo, 
began to see that their commercial prince held his lofty place 
at the expense of the popular liberties, and all his grand pat- 
ronage of culture could not entirely blind their eyes. 

One day a few leading men, doubtless of the seventy coun- 



368 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

cilors chosen by the Medici, advised Savonarola to be more 
discreet, and not to excite the people. "I attack only crime 
and injustice, and the earliest preachers did nothing less," said 
he; and surmising who had sent them, he added, "Go and 
tell Lorenzo de Medici that he would do well to repent, for 
God will call him to judgment. Tell him that I am a stranger, 
and he a citizen: yet I shall remain and he depart." This is a 
sample of his prophecies. Lorenzo was magnanimous, and the 
friar went on in "the liberty of prophesying," and becoming 
more and more the popular leader. The patron began to lose 
power. All his arts and magnificent festivals could not stay 
the rush to St. Mark. The general demand was, "Give us 
back the ancient liberty, the republic of 1198," and the friar 
was ready to promise it. In 1492 Lorenzo was dying at his 
country-house, and after receiving the sacrament he sent for the . 
reformer. The rumor was that the friar asked him to rely on 
the mercy of God, and restore all unjust gains. The dying 
man assented. One thing more: "Give back to Florence her 
liberty." Lorenzo silently turned his face to the wall: Savon- 
arola left him. And that shows the two men. 

The reformer's influence bore strongly upon the Renaissance. 
John Pico became his disciple, turned from the path of univer- 
sal knowledge, cultivated a child-like piety, studied the Holy 
Word, resolved to travel and preach, but died at the age of 
thirty-one (1495). A blow was struck upon the reviving pagan- 
ism in Italy, and its power declined. Charles VIII came with 
his French army, warring against papal aggression, and made a 
league with the Florentines. The Medici were expelled. The 
republic was restored, and by request Savonarola outlined its 
constitution. Schools were established, convents were reformed, 
the Bible was studied in its original languages, and his tremend- 
ous preaching was a means of instructing the people in their 
duties, religious, civil, and domestic. He aimed to build up a 
Christian commonwealth, whose sovereign was God, and whose 
law was his Word. 

"People of Florence, give yourselves to the study of the 
Holy Scriptures," he would say. "There you find the source 
of all good. They have been locked up. Let me open them to 
you ;" and then he would press the truth through the doors of 
their common life until his hearers found no hiding-place. He 



SUMPTUARY LAWS— "CHILDREN OF JESUS CHRIST." 369 

introduced that peculiar type of reform which was afterwards 
attempted by Calvinists at Geneva, and by Sixtus V at Rome. 
It was demanded by an age when sumptuary laws were needed 
in cities as means of refining the habits of the people. Public 
opinion did not restrain gross manners. When Savonarola and 
Calvin, whose positions were quite similar, made laws to regu- 
late domestic and social habits, it was because there was no 
force of custom to regulate them. They must create a purer 
sentiment. They aimed to secure a public morality which civ- 
ilized custom has brought to us. They may have gone to an 
extreme of rigor and trenched upon some natural liberties, but 
in the weediest fields the corn must suffer by the culture which 
saves it. After law has made social custom, then custom may 
prevail without legal enforcement. The first was their posi- 
tion, the second is our own. To such men our social decency 
owes another debt than harsh criticism. But the Florentine 
reformer seemed to depend less upon law than upon enthusiasm. 
His social power appeared magical. It was sometimes won 
and held by devices, and the relation of visions which indicate 
fanaticism, or a fevered brain. When under torture he blamed 
himself for having indulged too freely in prophesying events. 
The true patriot and reformer lives, not only to benefit his 
own generation, but also to educate the next. In this effort is 
one great lesson in Savonarola's life. He gave special attention 
to the children. We may disapprove the mode, but the fact 
is an example. He brought out their marvelous power. The 
young people were organized into bands as the ' ' Children of 
Jesus Christ," and in them were those of the leading citizens 
along with the poorest. They must shun all games, bad com- 
pany, vile songsters, wicked books, masquerades, fire-works, 
dances, and circuses. They must be often at confession, com- 
munion, prayers, and sermons. They had their captains, peace- 
makers, procession-masters, censors, and judges. They formed 
a juvenile republic. On certain days they marched through 
the streets, in perfect order, chanting hymns and litanies ; as 
the spectators dared not shout they wept. This enthusiasm of 
the children was caught by the citizens. On one day the 
women came in processions to the public square and flung their 
costliest ornaments into a pile as so much discarded worldliness. 
On another day the prodigal sons, the lewd monks, the amatory 

24 



370 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

poets, and the grave scholars brought their bad books and licen- 
tious poems, along with copies of the viler classics, and made a 
great bonfire in front of the cathedral. Many of the Lenten 
services were held before daylight. To-morrow morning eight 
hundred boys will march to the altar and receive the holy wafer. 
Scarcely has the bell struck midnight when people gather at the 
gates of the church, or stand within on the cold stone floor, the 
epoch of pews not having dawned. The companies of children 
are entering and keeping step to their song. Savonarola mounts 
the pulpit, and thousands of people, holding a taper in one 
hand and a book in the other, roll up the grand anthem, 
" Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord !" So an 
eye-witness describes it. At a Sunday festival the monks and 
chief citizens are the more prominent. Now they sing, "Long 
live Christ our King;" soon this is followed by "Florence in 
our hearts shall live, Florence forever." Much of this is im- 
pulse, and will have its reaction : and yet many priests are 
growing earnest in the work allotted them. Platonism is hid- 
ing itself. Only the purer classics are visible, and these are 
commended by the reformer. Scholars turn to Biblical studies. 
Men come from far to witness a social transformation the like 
of which was never heard of before. The foes of the move- 
ment are the vicious. 

A Dominican from Rome visits his brother monk, talks 
with him, remonstrates, spends three days in earnest discussion, 
and at last says, "Come, now, cease from these assaults on the 
clergy and these predictions of woes ; be quiet ; and then, I am 
authorized to say, his holiness will offer you the red hat of a 
cardinal." Savonarola need not ponder that bribe. "God 
forbid," he replies, "that I should be unfaithful to the embassy 
of my Lord. But — be at sermon to-morrow, and you shall 
hear." The pope's agent is present on the day fixed. The 
preacher begins, as usual, with some commonplaces, or logical 
propositions. He warms, elevates soul and voice, drifts into 
the favorite line of utterances, hurls astounding censures on all 
ranks of the clergy, and does not spare Pope Alexander, the 
infamous Borgia, who is able in talents, shrewd in policy, and 
devoid of honesty, shame, truth, honor, faith, morality ; for we 
may as well say that this blackest of popes is ruled by a court- 
esan, the mother of his five children, one of whom is Caesar, 



THE BORGIA PERPLEXED. 371 

the cardinal, and another is Lucretia, reputed as the most mon- 
strous of women in crime. This is the pope who is scathed 
and scorned by the preacher, whose voice at last expresses his 
sublime contempt : ' ' Red hat ! I wish for no other red hat 
than that of martyrdom, reddened with my own blood." 

The papal agent concluded that his mission had failed, 
mounted his mule, rode away, reported the case, and even the 
Borgia was perplexed. "He is honest" — that was the trouble — 
"but how shall we dispose of him? How prevent a schism at 
Florence?" These questions were heavy upon the papal mind, 
which was further agitated by rumors, letters, and messengers, 
by the failure of Peter de Medici to kill the reformer, and the 
refusal of the Florentine senate to arraign him. He retired to 
a convent for the sake of peace, and wrote to the Borgia: 
"My words are published every- where by booksellers. Let 
them be examined. My accuser has openly raved against your 
holiness^ and yet he charges me with the same sin. 
Although a sinner, I proclaim, with all my might, repentance 
of sins, amendment of life, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ — 
a faith almost extinct in the hearts of men. I intend shortly 
to publish a work on the Triumph _ of Christ,* and it will show 
whether I am a heretic." The senate bore high testimony to 
him, and was true to the restorer of its liberties, until a con- 
spiracy brought a new class of men into power. He received 
excommunication from the pope ; declared it came from the 
devil, and was null ; and felt more free to expose the papal sins. 

We can easily imagine the rest — the threat of an interdict, 
the mob, the riot, the seizure, the false charges, with the glori- 
ous charge that he taught justification by faith, the tortures, 
and the condemnation by his bitterest enemies. Like Huss, he 
had no fair hearing. At the execution, when the bishop was 
saying, "I separate thee from the Church militant and tri- 
umphant," Savonarola firmly replied, "Militant, but not 
triumphant; that of yours is not." His last words were: 
"In the closing hour God alone can bring comfort to mor- 
tal man. . . . The Lord has suffered as much for me." 
He was hanged, his body was burnt, and the ashes were 
thrown into the Arno (1498) ; but the truths he had uttered 

* His "Triumph of the Cross" has recently appeared in a new English 
edition. 



l>]2 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

flowed on like a river into the ocean of historic events. It was 
long before his followers disappeared. Priests far away admired 
him, read his sermons, and had his portrait. It is said that the 
people scattered flowers on the spot where he died, until a 
fountain was placed there to prevent it — a fitting monument 
unintended. In 1600 medals of him were openly sold in Rome. 
In 1832, when the Italian patriots sought to waken the dormant 
spirit of freedom, a group of scholars published his sermons, 
which had been long under ban of the popes. In 1855 his 
name was a watchword of liberty, and an ex-priest in London 
published and sent into Italy the "Echo of Savonarola," bear- 
ing his own words, "Italy shall be renewed.''' That prophecy 
is fulfilling to-day. 

He held advanced views upon papal supremacy and infalli- 
bility, and the seven sacraments. He did not renounce Mari- 
olatry and the mass. He adhered to the Roman Church. Still 
he was an Augustinian, and cherished "the very body of the 
Pauline theology." He defined faith Scripturally, and said: 
"Faith alone justifies; that is, makes righteous in the sight of 
God, without the works of the law. It is the source of all 
Christian virtues." In prison he wrote a commentary on the 
fifty-first Psalm ; Luther published it with a laudatory preface. 
His various works passed into all the languages of Western 
Europe. His richest biographer, Professor Villari, says: "Co- 
lumbus opened the paths of the ocean ; Savonarola began to 
open those of the Spirit. While one was ascending the pulpit, 
the other was dashing his bold prow through the waters of an 
unknown sea. Both believed themselves to have been sent ot 
God to spread Christianity over the earth; both had strange 
visions, which aroused each to his appointed work ; both laid a 
hand upon a new world, unconscious of its immensity. One 
was rewarded with chains, the other with a consuming fire." 

VII. The General Voice, and Need. 

To exhibit the sum total of dissent against the Romanism 
of the age now treated would be as great a task as to make a 
list of all the errors and evils then in the Church. Many were 
the complainants, from the Emperor Maximilian — who once 
thought of becoming pope in order to reform the Church, but 
took another crown in 1493 — down to the remotest Lollard, 



THE GENERAL COMPLAINT. 373 

Hussite, and Waldensian. The complaints ran upon papal 
politics and haughty dominion ; they rose loud against the 
frauds, the violence, the avarice, and the injustice of the court 
of Rome, the insolence, the tyranny, and the extortion of the 
papal legates ; the crimes, the ignorance, and the extreme prof- 
ligacy of the priests of all orders, and of the monks ; and the 
deception of Christ's own flock by men who hurried through a 
Latin service, and called that the feeding of the sheep. The 
shearing came when they mounted the pulpit, and, in popular 
language, offered to sell indulgences, or praised a system which 
was condemned by the more intelligent voice and conscience. 

What was needed? A restoration of the three ministries 
essential to the Church. Let there be a proper recognition of 
the perpetual ministry of Jesus Christ as teacher, intercessor, 
and king; then Mary would be uncrowned, the pope dismissed, 
the saints unadored, the mass removed, and the visible Church 
no longer regarded as a Savior, nor as the highest authority 
over mind and conscience. Restore the proper ministry of 
men, and let them stand, not as official apostles, nor as priestly 
mediators,* but as administrators of the Divine Word, with its 
sacraments and ordinances ; then the pardoner would give way 
to the preacher and the pastor, the confessional would be va- 
cated, penances not required, indulgences unsold, a fictitious 
purgatory left without a gate for the collection of revenues, 
monasticism abandoned, and all members of the Church enlisted 
in their proper work. Let the ministry of the Holy Spirit be 
duly recognized, and all theories of salvation by human works, 
rites, and ordinances would pass away. John Wessel wrote, 
"The Holy Ghost has reserved to himself the work of renew- 
ing, vivifying, and unifying the Church." 

It may be thought that the Middle Ages closed with an 
Autumn of falling leaves and dying grasses ; that Europe was 
like a corn-field in December, the stalks dead, the ripe ears 
harvested. But there was no such death. The field was alive 
with growths. The nations were astir with new enterprises. 
The people of all ranks were in fear, or in hope, of great 
changes in society ; the peasants were intent upon new revolu- 
tions (Note IV) ; and the minds of thousands were roused tc 



done 



* " The essence of popery is priesthood, and the mystic virtue of ritual acts 
by a priesthood." (Thomas Arnold.) 



374 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

inquiry. Not death, but life, ended the old age, and brought 
in the new. Never was it more evident that ' ' God was in 
history." 



NOTES. 

I. The Lollards of Kyle, Scotland, were taught by an English priest, 
John Resby, who was burnt at Perth about 1407, and is called Scotland's first 
known martyr. Lollardism increased in the South and West ; it may have 
been readily adopted by the remnant of the Culdees. An act of Parliament, 
1425, required the bishops to make close search for heresy. In 1433 Paul 
Craw, a refugee from Prague, was burnt for teaching Hussite doctrines. In 
1494 thirty persons, some of them in high station, were arraigned for heresy, 
but dismissed by King James IV, who was not inclined to persecute. 
Widely scattered in various lands the Lollards may have expected good 
results from the powerful sermons of Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican of Spain. 
At the age of forty-two he began his work of twenty years (1399-1419), 
preaching in France, Spain, England, Scotland, and Ireland. He wrote the 
"Spiritual Life," in which he said, "Christ manifests his truth to the lowly, 
and hides himself from the proud. . . . Consult God more than 
books. . . . Study drains the mind and heart. Go often to be refreshed 
at the feet of Christ under the cross." But he was devoted to a reformed 
papacy. In Spain he was active in nominally converting thousands of Jews, 
and these "New Christians," or Marranos, were afterwards inhumanly per- 
secuted by the Inquisition. They were neither genuine Christians nor con- 
sistent Jews. Many of them and of the Moriscos (Moors feigning con- 
version to avoid persecution) were among the one hundred and fourteen 
thousand victims attributed to the first inquisitor-general, the inhuman Tor- 
quemada (1483-98). Others fled, but constructive heresy was so rife that 
Deza (1510) had thirty-eight thousand victims, and the horrors of the time 
were deplored by Antonio de Lebrija, a devout Biblical scholar. Cardinal 
Ximenes, one of the milder inquisitors, is largely responsible for about fifty- 
three thousand victims (1 510-17). 

II. The Papacy. The last great pope of the Middle Ages was Pius 

II (^Eneas Sylvius, 1458-64), a learned man, who failed to be another 
Hildebrand, to retake Constantinople, and to persuade the sultan to adopt 
Christianity. Soon came the fall, for Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, and Alex- 
ander VI, made thirty-two years of the papacy (1471-1503) black with 
their infamous lives. After the papacy lost power by its immoralities, Pius 

III heard of his election, and his first word was "Reform," but he died in 
twenty-six days (1503). The profane Julius II led armies against the 
French invaders of Italy, and excommunicated Louis XII, who issued a 
medal inscribed, "I will destroy Babylon." The papacy was in league with 
the German emperor, Maximilian, when Luther visited Rome (1510), and 
when Leo X (1 513-21) promoted the Renaissance; but Leo is said to have 
been a skeptic in regard to the Gospel. 



NOTES ON CHAPTER XV. 375 

III. Printing, Books, and Bibles. The "Speculum Humana Salva- 
tionist seems to have been printed on blocks at Harlem, about 1440. 
Bonaventura's " Biblia Paufterum," about the same date. The Vulgate on 
the first metal types in 1455-60, at Mayence. The art extended rapidly ; 
great printers were editors and translators. Before the year 1500, more than 
ten thousand editions of books and pamphlets printed, chiefly in German 
and Italian cities. Caxton's press in London, 147 1-5; press in Scotland, 
1509. Hebrew Bible printed in Italy, 1488. Versions of the Bible in 
Italian, 147 1 ; Flemish, 1477; Spanish, 1478; Bohemian, 1488; and rapidly 
into most European languages after 1520. 

IV. Universities i?i Europe increased rapidly with the advance of learn- 
ing ; more than sixty were attempted or established before the year 1 500, 
and students are reported in some of them by thousands. We present a 
few in alphabetical order: Aberdeen, 1494; St. Andrew's, 141 1; Angers 
(law), 1364; Basle, 1460; Bologna, 1000; Bordeaux, 1472; Bourges, 1465; 
Cambridge claims 915; Cologne, 1385; Cordova, 968; Cracow, 1364; Er- 
furt, 1390; Florence, 1439; Freiburg, 1460; Geneva, 1368; Glasgow, 1450; 
Leipsic, 1409 ; Louvain, 1426 ; Lyons, 1000 ; Mayence, 1477 ; Orleans, 
1305; Oxford claims 900; Paris claims 800; Prague, 1348; Toulouse, 1229; 
Turin, 1405; Upsal, 1476; Vienna, 1365; Wurtzburg, 1403. 

V. Revolts of the Peasants. The attempts to secure popular liberty were 
reactions against (1) the feudal sytems, for kings and lords became op- 
pressive, and (2) the papal system, which became intolerable. The bond- 
age to priests and monks was often severer than that to feudal lords. The 
Black Death (1348-9) caused a demand for laborers and arise of wages; 
the peasants wished to leave the farms and earn higher pay in the towns, 
but the lords tried to retain them. In England the strikes reached their climax 
in the rebellion under Wat Tyler, and others like it. After 1385 the feudal 
servitude was nearly at an end in England, for the peasants might be paid 
in money and own property. Two Swiss republics were formed ( 13 1 5-147 1) 
by revolts of the oppressed people against their rulers. In Swabia and 
down the Rhine, the loudest murmur was against the Church. The alterna- 
tive was Revolution or Reform. In various quarters of Germany, Poor-Men 
rose up proclaiming "the kingdom of God," in which there were to be no 
tithes, taxes, kings, nor priests. In 1476 Hans Boheim had forty thousand 
peasants of Franconia gathered in a valley. Insurrections continued until 
the Peasant Wars of Luther's time. Papal powers had to repress the revo- 
lutionists, and thus they gave the reformers a freer opportunity among the 
wiser people. Many cities, such as Wittenberg, Heidelberg, Geneva, Berne, 
and Basle, gained sufficient freedom to adopt a reformed system, and main- 
tain the preachers of their choice. 



Period V. 



THE RISE AND ESTABLISHMENT OF PROTESTANTISM. 
a. M. 1500— 1660. 

THREE PHASES OF THE REFORMATION: I. REVIVAL OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH AND 
LIFE. 2. REFORM, OR RECONSTRUCTION OF THE EXISTING CHURCH, AS 
SEEN IN LUTHERANISM, ANGLICANISM, TRENTINE ROMANISM, AND JANSEN- 
ISM. 3. RESTORATION MORE THOROUGHLY OF APOSTOLIC DOCTRINE AND 
POLITY, AS CLAIMED BY THE REFORMED, OR CALVINISTIC CHURCHES — PROT- 
ESTANT CONFESSIONS OF FAITH — NATIONAL PROTESTANT CHURCHES — CON- 
FLICTS OF PROTESTANTS WITH EACH OTHER AND WITH ROMANISTS — DEVEL- 
OPMENT OF ARMINIANISM — PROTESTANT DENOMINATIONS — A DEFORMATION 
OF LIBERTY AND DOCTRINE IN NON-EVANGELICAL SECTS — RELIGIOUS WARS 
IN PROTESTANT LANDS — ADVANCES IN CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY AND IN TOL- 
ERATION — PEACE OF WESTPHALIA, 1 648, CLOSES THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR, 
AND ESTABLISHES PROTESTANTISM, WHICH IS BROUGHT TO A NEW CRISIS BY 
THE RESTORATION OF THE STUARTS, l66o, AND THE POLICY OF LOUIS XIV. 



Chapter XVI. 

THREE CIRCLES OF REFORMERS. 

1500-1521. 

In the Word of God were the means of reviving Chris- 
tianity, and restoring to the Church her three ministries. In 
the Renaissance were helps to the acquisition of its truths, 
and the translation of it into the languages of the people. In 
the Germanic race, whose long tutored nations were mature 
enough to be independent of Rome, were heroic men who 
made classical learning the assistant of Christian revelation. 
To them the Bible interpreted itself, when read under the 
breath of the Holy Ghost. They saw not only the evils in 
the then existing Church, but also the remedies for them. 
There had been a long preparation for the new movement. 
Dissent and reforms had blazed out roads of departure from 
376 



HEIDELBERG CIRCLE. 377 

Rome. The spirit of freedom, of research, of literature, of 
art, prompted the young men of studious habits to think for 
themselves. To secure the rights of private judgment and of 
conscience they must move in a new direction. Two facts 
evince the overruling power: (1.) Groups of men widely sep- 
arated, independently and contemporaneously study the same 
Holy Scriptures in the new light, and reach the same conclu- 
sions as to their supreme authority and essential value. (2.) 
Out of these circles come the men, almost contemporaneously, 
whom we call the leading reformers.* In each case, after the 
movements have fairly begun, the men cross each other's 
paths, catch each other's spirit, and make the grand advance 
upon the errors of their age. We shall learn most concerning 
the Reformation, not by leaping at once to the side of Luther 
as the pre-eminent champion, but by first sitting an hour in 
each circle of his predecessors and contemporaries. 

I. The Heidelberg Circle. The university there was an infant 
when Jerome of Prague came along, posted up some theses 
for discussion, and was silenced by those who wanted no 
Wyclifite lectures. Then came the famous John Wessel, the 
admirable teacher of sacred theology, well versed in the Latin, 
Greek, and Hebrew languages, and acquainted with philosophy 
in all its branches. He plowed deep and left in the furrows 
the seeds of a great harvest. He planted "the sacred lan- 
guages" in the mind of Rudolph Agricola, "the father of Ger- 
man Humanism/' who died in 1485, revered as a Christian of 
the manliest type. These men insisted that the Bible was the 
sole fountain of faith, and faith the essential means of justifica- 
tion. The prince of the Palatinate, his court, and his bishop, 
Dalberg, favored these ideas. Heidelberg promised to be the 
cradle of a reformed theology. Many of its students, such as 



* Compare the dates of the reformatory work of 1. The Reformers of the 
Transition; at Florence, Savonarola, 1470-98; in Germany, Reuchlin, 1500-22; 
at Oxford, Colet, 1496-1519 ; at Oxford and Basle, Erasmus, 1498-1536; at 
Paris, Le Fevre, 1510-20. 2. Early Protestant Reformers, at Wittenberg, 
Luther, 1512-46; in German Switzerland, Zwingli, 1516-31 ; at Basle, CEco- 
lampadius, 1522-31 ; in French Switzerland, Farel, 1520-65; in England, 
Tyndale, 1514-36; Bilney, 1515-54; Latimer, 1524-54. The fact that so many 
men, at the same time, had similar thoughts, was a proof to Zwingli that the 
work was of God. "No historical event so clearly and plainly displays a ruling 
divine Providence as the German Reformation." (Kurtz.) 



378 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Bucer, Brentz, Sturm, and Melancthon, threw themselves into 
the great reform. They generally enlisted in "the army of the 
Reuchlinists, " so called from John Reuchlin, the celebrated 
jurist, and the next leader of the German humanists. The 
life of this man is the history of the literary renaissance. The 
poor singer in the church at Pforzheim wins the heart of a 
prince who wants a companion for his son, and the lads are sent 
to the University of Paris. There the chorister receives from 
John Wessel (1475) the advanced learning and theology, and 
earns bread and books by making copies of Homer for richer 
students. In his frequent travels to Rome and across Europe, 
and in his lectures in various cities, he is known as the Greek- 
speaking German. Heidelberg finds him learned in history. 
Diplomatists are faced by his knowledge of law. But his 
studies, collection of manuscripts, grammar and lexicon, and 
the impetus given to the study of one language, make him the 
restorer of Hebrew to Germany. His foible was his cabalistic 
lore. He became the champion in two linguistic battles, one 
against monkish hatred of Hebrew and the other against monk- 
ish Latin. A sincere monk wrote, "Men have invented a new 
language which they call Greek; guard against it, my brethren, 
for it is the mother of every sort of heresy. That book which 
they call the New Testament is full of thorns and serpents. 
As for Hebrew, it is certain that all who learn it instantly 
become Jews !" 

The Dominicans at Cologne got an order from the Emperor 
Maximilian, that all Hebrew books (except the Bible) should 
be brought to the town hall and burnt. Reuchlin said to the 
emperor, "Let all rabbinical writings which blaspheme Christ 
(as these monks say) be burnt, if you will, but save the rest. 
The wisest way to refute and convert the Jews is to appoint two 
professors of Hebrew in each university." The books were 
not burnt. The Dominicans cited Reuchlin before their inqui- 
sition on charges of heresy. He appealed to Pope Leo X, and 
was sustained. The inquisitors were condemned to pay the 
costs of the process. When they refused, it was with great 
pleasure that the knight, Francis of Sickingen, collected the 
amount by force. 

As Reuchlin was attacked for his Hebrew and Greek, he 
and the Heidelberg circle resolved to set the learned world 



ULRIC HUTTEN— THE OXFORD CIRCLE— JOHN COLET. 379 

laughing over the Latin of the monks. They sent forth, one 
by one, "The Letters of Obscure Men," written in the most 
barbarous style, bad spelling and wretched grammar. The wri : 
ters assumed to be sincere, earnest, and precisely such monks 
as were all around them. They jeered the great Hebraist a 
little, and praised without stint the writers who were most igno- 
rant. Monks were represented as telling their peccadillos in 
confidence, and asking advice in affairs of gallantry. The effect 
of this burlesque was prodigious. Many monks could not see 
the joke, and some of them helped to circulate the spicy letters 
until the learned world heaped upon them unbounded contempt. 
They were then furious, but their wrath could not repair their 
loss of respectability. One of this circle was Ulric Hutten, the 
boldest mouth-piece of humanism. He had studied the clas- 
sics in the old monastery of Fulda, and fled when the vows of 
a monk were to be forced on him. Penniless, and not ventur- 
ing back to his father's castle, he endured every sort of adver- 
sity, roaming through German and Italian cities, now student, 
now soldier, always a wit, rhymer, and in 15 17 the poet-laureate 
of Germany. In his many writings he scathed the Roman 
clergy, and sought to rouse the spirit of liberty in his father- 
land. His method of reform was political revolution. 

II. The Oxford Circle. When Grocyn and Linacre, along 
with other young Englishmen, came up from Italy laden with 
the new wisdom, they found at Oxford a demand for all they 
could offer. "It is marvelous," wrote a friend, "what a thick 
crop of ancient learning is springing up through all this coun- 
try. " The growth was strongly Biblical, and this was largely 
due to John Colet, son of the mayor of London, an Oxford 
student, a gatherer of knowledge in Italy, and the chief of the 
circle which had its headquarters in this university. He had 
left Plato for Paul, whose writings charmed his soul. His views 
were similar to those of Wyclif, though less pronounced. He 
brought scholastic logic and theology into contempt. He had 
one use for Greek ; it was the key to the New Testament, in 
which he found more and more of the riches of Christ, and 
none of the traditions and errors of papal Rome. In 1499 he 
was holding a powerful influence over two great men. One 
was the young Londoner, Thomas More, so prominent in En- 
glish literature and history, "a marvelous rare man" in past 



380 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ages. The other was the famous Dutchman, Erasmus, who 
had been an orphan boy, reared among the Brethren of the 
Common Life at Deventer. While he was a monk he received 
an impulse toward Biblical studies and criticism. Forsaking 
his mild vows, teaching poor lads for his scanty bread, and 
drifting with the tide, he worked his way into such knowledge 
as the University of Paris could offer him. He wrote, "I 
have given up my whole soul to Greek learning, and as soon 
as I can get any money I shall buy Greek books, and then 
clothes." Too poor to go to Italy, he came over, about 1498, 
with his pupil, Lord Montjoy, and joined the Oxford Circle. 
He and Colet were each about thirty-one years of age. More 
was ten years younger. They honestly sought a reform within 
the existing Church by means of culture and the Word of God. 
"Reform without schism" became a great idea in Europe. 
Colet went to London, as the dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, 
and boldly preached to immense audiences. He founded, with 
his own funds, the celebrated St. Paul's school. More wrote 
the "Utopia," and advanced noble ideas of religious liberty. 
While they earnestly opposed gross evils in the Church, the 
barbarities of war, and oppressive legislation, they regarded 
King Henry VIII as the friend of their enterprises. Erasmus 
was supplied with funds to visit Italy. On his return, in 1509, 
he was for a short time professor of Greek and lecturer on 
theology at Cambridge. 

Erasmus has been called "the restorer of good sense." 
But he has been severely blamed for his time-serving spirit, as 
it is called. His want of sound health was a cause of many 
of his whims, yet wit and humor were as abundant as if he 
were fit for nothing else than to revise the editions of his 
"Praise of Folly," and the "Colloquies," in which the monks 
were scored unmercifully. He was the impersonation of liter- 
ary culture, the best critic and editor of his time ; fond of 
literary leisure, retirement, and praise, and yet an astonishing 
worker in his sphere ; not a hero, and he knew it ; averse to 
enthusiasm, and afraid that Luther was going too far ; the cen- 
sor of popes and all manner of popery, yet hopeful that the old 
Church would be reformed, preserved, and made the true home 
of all Christ's flock. He wished the Protestants to remodel the 
old Church and not form a new one. He dreaded sectarianism 



ERASMUS. 381 

and schism. He was timid of heresy, and yet he must have 
smiled when he said that a Spaniard had found sixty thousand 
heresies in his writings. The Romanists were afraid of him; 
the Protestants thought that he had no moral courage to fight 
their hot battle. Between the two bodies most men would 
have fallen into contempt. But he reigned over a broad realm. 
"He sat on his throne, an object of admiration and of envy." 
Statesmen and scholars did him reverence. Perhaps he might 
have received a cardinal's hat if he had bowed lowly enough 
for it. He belongs to the transition, but the fact that his 
writings were in great demand and widely circulated by an 
active press, shows that the European mind was disposed to 
break away from the mediaeval systems of thought and worship. 

His services to the Reformation are not likely to be overes- 
timated. They are seen in his exposures of the faults of his 
age and Church, his pleas for religious liberty in which he was 
in advance of his time ; his example in mental freedom, leading 
men to search below the surface, and use their reasoning powers ; 
his editions of Cyprian and Jerome, and his translations from 
other Fathers ; his own theology which threw scholasticism into 
the shade before Luther was an author, and his labors in Bibli- 
cal criticism, the best fruit of which was his edition of the Greek 
Testament (15 16) with a Latin translation, and with paraphrases 
which were once ordered to be read in all the churches of 
England. This last was the great book of the era, the main 
source of the Protestant theology. It broke down the Latin 
Vulgate in the minds of thousands. It was the foundation for 
the new translations which soon appeared in popular languages. 
In his preface he said, ' ' I wish that even the weakest woman 
should read the Gospels — read the Epistles of Paul. I wish 
they were translated so that they might be read and understood 
not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Sara- 
cens. I long that the farmer shall sing portions of them to 
himself as he follows the plow ; the weaver hum them to the 
tune of his shuttle, and the traveler read their stories to while 
away the tedium of his journey." He boldly restored the true 
standard of faith, and said that "the strength of the Christian 
religion does not depend on man's ignorance of it. " He brought 
forward the sensible method of interpreting the Bible. 

Erasmus had hoped that the pope and the kings would 



382 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

listen to his protests against indulgences and tyrannies of every 
sort, but they were deaf. The very year that Luther's theses 
roused Europe (15 17), he wrote to Colet, "I have made up my 
mind to spend the remainder of my life with you in retirement 
from a world which is every-where rotten. Ecclesiastical hypo- 
crites rule in the courts of princes. The court of Rome has 
lost all sense of shame." To another friend he wrote, "I see 
that the very height of tyranny has been reached. The pope 
and kings count the people not as men, but as cattle in the 
market." Two years later Colet was in his grave. Erasmus 
lived chiefly among the editors, and near the best libraries of 
the Continent. In 1535 More perished, a martyr to the fury 
of his king. Just a year later Erasmus died among the Prot- 
estants of Basle. They had lived as friends : they never ceased 
to oppose their culture to the flagrant evil in the Church, but 
they never left the "Old Catholicism." 

III. The Wittenberg Circle* Frederick the Wise became 
Elector of Saxony in 1487, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, 
and then displayed such honesty and ability that the Germans 
began to think of him as their next emperor. He had an eye 
for good men, and engaged John Staupitz in his humanistic en- 
terprises. John was of noble birth, meek spirit, and a believer 
in the theology of the heart, but a student of Augustine and 
the Bible. "My Staupitz was a great man," said Luther; "not 
merely learned and eloquent in schools and churches, but be- 
loved and highly honored at courts and by the great. He had 
a powerful intellect, an honest, upright, noble disposition." In 
1502 he greatly aided Frederick in founding the University of 
Wittenberg. He was the first dean of its theological faculty. 
It was established in the interest of humanism, advanced 
thought, liberty, justice, and law. It fronted square against 
the worn-out scholastic system. It honored Tauler, a Kempis, 
and Wessel far more than Albert and Aquinas. Its patron saint 
was Augustine — a significant fact. The Augustinian monks 
had the main charge of it, and John became the vicar-general 
of their order. On one of his visits to the convents, reform- 
ing them as he best could, he came to Erfurt. His heart was 
touched at seeing a young monk, of middle height, lean by 

* The circle at Paris contributed to the Renaissance and to a semi-Protest- 
ant type of reform. 



LUTHER. 383 

fasting and vigils, sad, and evidently in some spiritual struggle. 
This was Luther, who now found such a friend as he had never 
met before. 

''Luther has been the restorer of liberty in modern times. 
If he denied it in theory, he established it in practice." This 
hearty tribute comes from Michelet, who admits that his free- 
dom of the pen, within his own Roman Church, is due to this 
"liberator of modern thought." Scores of men applaud the 
freedom, but reject the faith which made Protestantism a bless- 
ing to the human race. Which was the stronger element? 

No other reformer is so well known as Martin Luther. The 
sudden turns in his career, the free play of all his powers, the 
manly independence of a great soul, his impulses, his music, 
his humor, his words often wild, his courage always firm, his 
triumphs in many a crisis, and his tried loyalty to the Divine 
Master, have charmed the writers and the readers of his life. 
This miner's son, born in the Saxon village of Eisleben, 1483, 
may have had ancestors in Thuringia, among the wild foresters 
to whom Boniface had first preached the Gospel. His poor 
book-loving father improved his condition at Mansfield and rose 
to some civil offices, but the son never forgot the days when 
his pious mother carried wood on her shoulders into town to 
procure the means of rearing her children. The striking fact 
of his early life is the severity of its discipline. His well-mean- 
ing, devout, prayerful, instructive parents were severe with the 
rod. His teacher beat him fifteen times in one day for the 
slightest offenses. The lad grows through poverty with buoyant 
energies which no hard usage can repress. The best schools 
are chosen for him in towns where he sings, as many lads of 
the time must do, for a little bread, until the Cottas of Eisenach 
take him to live happily with them. He reads Latin, makes 
verses, music, and speeches, prays with more fervor, eclipses 
his schoolmates, wakens in his masters a foresight of his power, 
and, at the age of eighteen, enters the University of Erfurt, the 
best then in Germany. There his mind is not fettered by Aris- 
totle and the schoolmen. He studies them, but does his own 
thinking. He will not devote himself entirely to the law, 
though his father urges it and pays his expenses. In philos- 
ophy he prefers Occam, "that sensible man." 

"I was twenty years old," says Luther, "before I ever saw 



384 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the Bible. I had no notion that there existed any other Gos- 
pels and epistles than those in the service. At last I came 
across a Bible in the library at Erfurt." It was the Latin Vul- 
gate. His eyes rested on the story of Hannah and Samuel, 
and as he read it he wished "for no other wealth than a copy 
of this book." But he did not yet see the Reformation that 
lay hid in it. When ill from intense study the best that an 
aged priest could say to him was, "Take courage; you will not 
die now; God will make you the consoler of many souls." At 
home, during the Easter of 1503, his sword fell upon his foot, 
and when his life was streaming away through an artery he 
cried, "O Mary, help me!" As a doctor of philosophy he 
began to teach the physics and ethics of Aristotle. The sudden 
death of his friend, Alexis, was not enough to divert him from 
the hopeful career of a philosopher, lecturer, and lawyer. In 
1505 he was again returning from his father's house to the 
university when a stroke of lightning brought him to the 
ground. He made his vow. He would become a holy man — a 
monk! 

He gave his friends a parting supper, with music and wit, 
and that very night he entered the convent of the Augustines 
at Erfurt. "How I must have surprised folks by turning 
monk!" He leaves behind all the classics except Virgil and 
Plautus, — an epic and a comedy. An angry letter comes to 
him from his honest father, who will not be soothed by the 
entreaties of all his kindred, but lets his wrath flame on long 
after many a sunset. He had hoped to see Martin an emi- 
nent man. 

That free act marks the first great change in Luther. Monas- 
tic life had long been regarded as the best method of holiness. 
He must fully know its worthlessness by an experience of its 
drudgeries, and even its honors. The menial of a convent 
became an overseer of important work for his order. But while 
he bore the beggar's sack he often meditated in his cell as a 
man of high culture and independent mind, having the degrees 
of a university somewhere among his papers and parchments. 
He read works of theology from Augustine to Gerson and Tau- 
ler and John Wessel. He led the way in debates and threw 
out astounding ideas. He lingered at the convent Bible, which 
was chained to a desk, as a cup is to a town pump. He drank 



LUTHER ORDAINED. 385 

deep from God's fountain. He seems to have learned Hebrew 
and Greek. But this free mind gradually discovered its bond- 
age to sin; it had not yet perceived its slavery to error and 
untruth. He thought that Christ was only a law-giver — the 
Moses whose law was embodied in the penitential system of the 
mediaeval Church, whose sacrifice was in the mass, whose priests 
were the clergy, and whose Levites were the monks. Luther 
must make satisfaction for his own sins — the dogma at the very 
root of Romanism — and at the last day Christ would demand 
of us all how we had made atonement by our harsh endurances 
and our good works. He was nearing death by his severities 
and anguish of soul when Staupitz found him and drew from 
him the cause. "It is in vain that I make promises to God; 
sin is ever the strongest." 

Staupitz knew all that, for he had been in the depths of 
such painful experience. He gently led the pale monk to those 
simple truths so familiar to us. "Look to the wounds of 
Christ — the death of the Lord Jesus — there his mercy will 
appear. Instead of torturing yourself on account of your sins 
throw yourself into the Redeemer's arms. Trust in him — in the 
righteousness of his life — in the atonement of his death." After 
other instruction and sympathy Staupitz presented him with a 
Bible, pointing to it as the one book to be studied. But still 
Luther cried: "Oh my sin, my sin, my sin!" An aged monk 
said to him: "I believe in the forgiveness of sins, " and one of 
the oldest of creeds, learned by Martin in childhood, began to 
ring out the words of a living faith. The needed light was not 
yet full; he sought it in God's book. 

John Luther, not yet quite pacified, came over in 1507 to 
see Martin ordained a priest — a presbyter — who might have a 
right to preach and to celebrate the mass. The bishop handed 
to Luther the sacred cup, saying, ' ' Receive the power of sacri- 
ficing for the living and the dead." Luther was too sincere to 
recite the mass, as many priests did, for the sake of the fees. 
To him it had not lost its dignity and awfulness. His father 
was quite reconciled. He gave his son twenty florins and dined 
with the monks, but he still said of Martin's entrance into the 
convent: "Did not the Scripture tell you to obey your father 
and mother?" Monasticism was losing popular respect. 

Not yet did Luther perceive that "the just shall live by 

25 



$86 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

faith," for they are justified by faith. * This doctrine, which 
was to be his lever in overturning Europe, was more fully 
grasped when on his visit to Rome, in 1510, on some mission 
for his order. He there saw evils, levities at mass, hypocrisies, 
and abominations, but the true method of reforming the Church 
was not yet clear to him. 

Not Rome, but Wittenberg, was the scene of this discovery ; 
not merely the inspection of the papal system, but the deeper 
study of Holy Scripture was the cause of it. A knowledge of 
diseases alone does not make a man a physician; it shows him 
where to apply the remedies which another science has taught 
him. In 1508 he was engaged by Staupitz as a professor at 
Wittenberg. The new university needed him to give it character 
and reputation. He needed its free air, its youthful vigor, its 
founder's shield. It was the place of his spiritual growth, the 
center of his power. In that city were to be his cell while a 
monk, his home after marriage, his mighty pulpit, his honored 
grave. An old university, with its fixed system, its professors 
of traditionalisms, and its machinery for branding heretics might 
have expelled him as the Sorbonne thrust out Le Fevre. Prob- 
ably no other prince in all Europe would have been such a firm 
and wise protector as Frederick. 

Luther wrote to Curate Braun : ' ' By God's grace I am 
well, except that I have to study philosophy with all my 
might. I had hoped to exchange it for theology ; I mean that 
theology which seeks the kernel in the nut, the wheat in the 
husk, the marrow in the bones." The next year he was Pro- 
fessor of Biblical Studies. Every afternoon he lectured on the 
Bible, beginning with the Psalms, then taking the epistles to 
the Romans and the Galatians. Men perceived that he had 
read Augustine and Tauler and Wessel ; but they may not 
have known how he used the Hebrew apparatus of Reuchlin to 
draw water from the wells of salvation. He took his degree — 
not doctor of the Sentences, but Doctor Biblicus. He received 
it, saying, ' ' I swear to defend the evangelical truth with all 
my might." And from that day he was the eminent champion 
of the Bible. The Greek Testament of Erasmus came fresh 
from the press at Basle. He and a little band studied it. By 

* Aristotle was then often quoted as teaching that by doing justly men are 
justified. He was high authority among the followers of the schoolmen. 



THE BIBLICAL THEOLOGY. 387 

degrees they sailed over the mediaeval theologies into the re- 
moter past of apostolic times, and there found a continent of 
facts as rich and fresh as Juan Diaz and Ponce de Leon were 
then treading in the new world — geologically, the real old 
world. The followers into this vast realm of truth appear in 
surprising numbers. Luther writes: "God is at work. Our 
theology and St. Augustine advance admirably, and prevail in 
our university. Aristotle is declining; he totters to his speedy 
and eternal ruin. The lectures on the Sentences produce noth- 
ing but weariness. No one can hope for hearers unless he 
professes the Biblical theology." This culture did not stop 
with humanism. It made a servant of the Renaissance, in 
which Luther had all the delight of one who loved music, art, 
poetry, language, eloquence, and every right means of human 
bliss. But refinement was not holiness ; the fine arts might 
endanger faith. Hence he would not burn incense to his drag 
and net ; not value the sickle above the harvest. He was 
probably the happiest man in Europe, after he had experienced 
the genuine Reformation in his own soul. Doubtless that joy- 
ful experience had a great effect on the popular mind, as that 
of Paul had in the founding of Christianity. 

/In no factious spirit Luther wrote : "I am reading Eras- 
mus, but he daily loses credit with me. I like to see him so 
firmly and learnedly rebuke the groveling ignorance of the 
monks and priests ; but I fear he does not render great service 
to the teachings of Jesus Christ. He loves the human more 
than the divine. 4 We are living in dangerous times. A man 
is not a good and wise Christian simply because he knows 
Greek and Hebrew. Jerome, who knew five languages, is in- 
ferior to Augustine, who knew but one, although Erasmus 
thinks the contrary. I carefully conceal my opinion of him, 
lest I give advantage to his foes. Perhaps the Lord will give 
him understanding in due time." 

Thus Luther had advanced beyond ceremonialism, merito- 
rious works, penances, scholasticism, the ritualistic services of 
a priest, the oppressive routine of a monk, and the mere cul- 
ture of the Renaissance. He stands redeemed, not simply 
reformed, with a Bible in his hand, and his voice ringing out 
in widening circles through Europe : ' ' True liberty is what 
thou needest, and God offers it to thee in the Gospel." One 



388 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

step more must be taken : he must break from the Roman 
Church, even against his first intention, for it will not allow 
itself to be radically reformed. Three years (15 17-1520) will 
bring it by means of indulgences and excommunications on the 
part of Rome ; on his part, bold theses and a bonfire. 

1. Indulgences were nothing new.* The sale of them had 
grown into a trade. T The pardon of sins was offered in the 
market, as government bonds are now sold. The buyer pur- 
chased a pardon-ticket, which guaranteed to him a release from 
the penalties of the sins named on it (such as murder at seven 
ducats, simony at ten, robbing at twelve, and blacker crimes 
at cheaper rates), or the release of a soul from purgatory/ The 
Germans had never liked this business. They had said, at the 
Council of Constance, "It is most abominable that popes put 
a price upon sins, as shopkeepers do upon wares."/ The abuse 
became a madness; and John Tetzel came in 15 17 with the 
fifth lot of indulgences since 1500, so that the people felt op- 
pressed. One of his mountebank notices ran thus: "The red 
indulgence cross with the pope's arms on it has the same virtue 
as the cross of Christ!" The scheme wds professedly to raise 
more money to finish the great Cathedral of St. Peter at Rome, 
but the rulers were suspicious. Leo X offered Henry VIII 
one-fourth of what should be raised in England, but Henry 
bargained for one - third ! Kings were to share in the spoils. 
The Dominicans were the traffickers in Germany ; and from 
the shops of Tetzel "the German coin flew lightly as feathers 
over the Alps, and no wagoner could draw such heaps of 
money." When he was entering certain cities the bells were 
rung, and a vast procession, of clergy, men, women, children, 
even school-masters and learned men, went to meet him at 
the gate. 

2. Luther had already preached against this outrage, and 
urged bishops to do their duty. When Tetzel came near to 
Wittenberg the reformer's indignation was almost boundless ; 
for this monk was selling the pardon of sins which a man 
might wish to commit hereafter ! Luther wrote his Ninety-five 
Theses, in which he stated the doctrine of repentance, and ad- 
mitted that the lesser penances laid upon men by the Church, 
or pope, might be commuted for money ; but he denied that 

*See Chapter XII, Note II. 



THE GREAT CONTROVERSY. 389 

this kind of indulgences were of any spiritual value, and put 
Romanism and Christianity in strong contrast. In the blaze 
of noon he nailed these theses on the door of the church, so 
that they might be read by the crowd that would gather there 
to celebrate the festival of All Saints (November 1, 15 17). He 
thus committed himself to "that great revolution which ren- 
dered the right of examination lawful in Europe." To meet 
him on these he challenged all comers, but nobody came to 
dispute them. He meant them for a local purpose ; but they 
set all Germany in commotion. There were opponents who 
did their utmost to repel the effects, but it seemed as if the 
intelligence of Europe was almost entirely on Luther's side. 
f "I had a dream," said Frederick. "I saw this monk of ours 
writing words on the church-door so large that I could read 
them eighteen miles off; and the pen grew larger and longer 
till it reached Rome, touched the pope's triple crown, and 
made it totter.",? The elector did not permit Tetzel to enter 
his realm. 

The theses went over Europe "as if scattered by angels' 
hands." The Emperor Maximilian was not sorry, nor was 
Erasmus displeased at heart. "Thanks be to God," said 
Reuchlin, "the monks have now found a man who will give 
them such full employment that they will be glad to let me 
alone in my old age!" Even Pope Leo was not angry at first; 
he laughed until the Dominicans gave him some alarm. Still 
he thought the affair a mere quarrel between two monks, and 
even praised Brother Martin as a remarkable genius. He smiled 
when one monk cried "Heresy," and ordered a Dominican to 
write better replies to Luther, or be silent. Luther was brought 
into a wide correspondence ; his letters spread the truth. He 
was active in the disputations in several cities, and in the great 
controversy upon the doctrines of grace. Papal legates were 
sent to discuss with him, and bring him to terms. He debated 
with Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg (15 18), only to be more 
confirmed in his position, and appeal, in somewhat violent 
terms, "from the pope ill-informed to the same when better 
informed." Still later he appealed to a general council; but no 
pope dared to call one for more than twenty years. Finding 
that the cardinal intended to seize him, he escaped by night. 

In the conference at Altenburg (15 19) his Saxon opponent, 



390 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Baron Miltitz, admitted that he would not venture to take 
Luther out of Germany with an army ten thousand strong, for 
nine out of every ten men were on his side. He ingeniously 
begged Luther not to disturb the peace of the Church. The 
reformer's heart was touched by this sympathetic pleader, and 
fearing "lest the song he had struck up would get too high for 
him," he agreed to keep silent on the questions in dispute if 
his opponents would also cease. He wrote to Pope Leo, assur- 
ing him that the papacy was still honored by him as next to 
Christ in authority over the Church, an idea which he soon 
abandoned. This hollow truce was soon broken by Dr. Eck, 
no mean theologian, and Carldstadt, a Wittenberg professor of 
theology, who was eager for notoriety, and became "a precur- 
sor of the German rationalists." These men were to hold a 
public discussion at Leipsic. Thither went Luther, with Me- 
lancthon at his side in an open wagon, and perhaps he had 
again to borrow a coat for the occasion. He heard the debate 
on free-will and grace, saw Dr. Eck have the advantage, and 
heard the schoolmen highly applauded. It might be a critical 
hour for the reformed theology. On the morning of July 4, 
1 5 19, Luther rose on the platform, held a charming bouquet of 
flowers, and grew eloquent and bold as he stated principles not 
hitherto avowed by him; that the Latin Church is not exclu- 
sively the Church ; that the pope is not the universal primate by 
any divine right; that councils may err, and that one had erred 
in condemning John Huss, whose doctrines were drawn from 
Scripture and St. Augustine. When a man asserted such bold 
doctrines as these the scholastics lost all hope of him. They 
despaired of his return to their faith and fold. "It seems," he 
said, "that I have become a Hussite without knowing it. St. 
Paul and Augustine were Hussites." 

But he still claimed to be a dutiful son of the Church. He 
had no intention of leaving it. Meanwhile he had been feeding 
the hungry people of Germany with something better than 
matters of controversy. He had sent forth little books on the 
Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer. Hearing that 
papal bulls were preparing for him he wrote ' ' The Babylonish 
Captivity of the Church." He sent forth an "Address to the 
Nobility of the German Nation." It was his appeal to the 
people. "Why do the Germans let themselves be fleeced by 



MELANCTHON. 39 I 

cardinals who get the high offices and spend the revenues at 
Rome? Let us not give another farthing to the pope. . . . 
Let his power be reduced to proper limits. Let the national 
Churches be more independent of Rome. Let there be fewer 
pilgrimages and convents. Let priests marry. Let begging be 
stopped. Let us inquire into the position of the Bohemians, 
and if Huss was in the right let us join them in resisting Rome!" 
Germany will respond to the appeal. 

3. Luther had now a warm-hearted colleague at his side. 
A devout armorer of Bretten, whose coats of mail glistened on 
the Palatine nobles, was dying in 1507, and he said to his son 
Philip : ' ' I foresee that mighty tempests are about to shake the 
world. May God lead thee!" The lad often years may have 
cured his stammering by declaiming the wise rhymes of his 
mother. His power of acquiring knowledge was marvelous. 
He was soon the Greek among his school-mates. His renowned 
kinsman, John Reuchlin, gave him a Bible and changed his 
name of Schwartzerd to Melancthon. At fourteen he took the 
degree of bachelor of arts in the Heidelberg University; at seven- 
teen he was a doctor of philosophy and a lecturer at Tubingen. 
There he was suspected of reading profane authors during the 
services in Church, for his book did not seem to be a liturgy. 
It was a Bible. All his life he carried it with him to public 
assemblies. He seems never to have been ordained a priest. 
As a scholarly layman he might have followed Erasmus, had 
he not been called to Wittenberg, in 15 18, as the professor of 
the Greek language and literature. He began with his lectures 
on Homer and the Epistles of Paul. Luther wrote of him as 
"the very learned and most Grecian Philip, a mere lad as you 
look on him, but his lecture-room is always full. All the the- 
ologians go to hear him. He is making every body begin to 
read Greek." He raised Wittenberg into the school of the 
nation, and a model for all universities which reformed their 
methods of teaching. New modes of instruction in the classics, 
philosophy, and Scripture gave a broad science and a definite 
system to Protestantism. He was soon called the Preceptor of 
Germany. These men were life-long brothers, wisely united in 
one work by the divine Providence. "The miner's son drew 
the metal of faith up from the deep pit; the armorer's son 
fashioned the metal for defense and defiance." Both had their 



392 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

moments of impetuosity and their days of moderation. But 
generally Luther was the more heroic, vehement, intent on vic- 
tory, and ready to win it by "words which are half-battles." 
Melancthon was the more amiable, discreet, conciliatory, and 
forward to unite parties. The one roused men and rallied 
forces; the other organized them. If one was too free with the 
spur, the other took the check-rein, and so they rode together 
into the contest against the papacy and the empire. After the 
great leader was gone from earth, his helper gazed on his por- 
trait and said: "Each word of thine was a thunder-bolt." 

4. The excommunication of Luther came in 1520, the pope 
offering him sixty days in which to recant. If he did not then 
submit, every magistrate was authorized to arrest him and de- 
liver him over to Rome. Two questions rose : What would 
Luther do with the papal bull? What would Elector Frederick 
do with Luther? 

5. The bonfire, on the 10th of. December, 1520, was the 
signal of a new liberty. Luther and his colleagues led a pro- 
cession of students and citizens through the Elster Gate, and 
there, "in the presence of the great German river Elbe," he 
cast into the flames a piece of parchment, such as had dethroned 
proud emperors and had blasted good reformers. With it went 
a copy of the papal decretals and the canon laws of the pope, 
while the timid gazed in blank amazement, and the courageous 
lifted a shout of liberty. It was a grand hour, when a monk 
could defy the might of Rome and of empire, and when a pope 
had but one resource left — the power of the emperor. 

What would Elector Frederick do now? "Much depends 
on this prince, or Luther may be crushed," said Melancthon. 
But Frederick had just the kind of power needed at the crisis — 
strong moral and personal influence. Only the year previous 
(15 19) the seven German electors had met to vote for a new 
emperor. The French were there with their golden bribes to 
elect Francis I, and the Spaniards, with more gold to turn the 
scale for Charles. Erasmus wrote, "When the imperial crown 
was offered to Frederick of Saxony (the protector of Luther) 
by all the electors, he magnanimously declined it and named 
Charles, who would never have been elected otherwise. Fred- 
erick refused the thirty thousand florins offered by the Spanish 
agents, and when asked to let his servants take ten thousand he 



ROMANISM OF CHARLES V. 393 

replied: 'They can take them if they like, but no one shall 
remain in my service who accepts a single piece of gold. ' The 
next day he took horse and departed lest they should continue to 
bother him." We may regret that the good, honest, cool-headed 
elector was not even forced to be emperor. But had he been 
emperor the Reformation in Europe would doubtless have 
resulted in a modified Romanism. His noble service was to 
stand firmly by Luther, advising him to avoid rash words and 
measures (from which he was not wholly free to the last), and 
imparting courage to other princes. He was a providential man. 

What would Emperor Charles V do ? On him the pope 
depended, for when the papacy was insulted and defied and was 
politically weaker than it had been for centuries, the empire 
seemed to be more nearly a universal monarchy than it had 
been since the days of Charlemagne. Yet he had to fight 
almost as much to maintain it, and even make war upon Rome. 
He must think of Turks as seriously as of heretics. He orders 
Luther's books to be burnt in the Netherlands; the publishers 
send new supplies. He reminds rulers and magistrates of their 
duty to obey the pope's bull and arrest Luther; but those who 
wish to obey have two difficulties: Luther is not in their dis- 
tricts, and Frederick will not drive him into their traps. The 
Wittenbergers can not read a bull that has been calcined. 
Charles can not send an army to Wittenberg, nor put it under 
interdict, for his oath forbids such work except by consent of 
the Diet or congress of electors, princes, and representatives of 
the cities. In 1521, just thirty-eight days after the great fire- 
signal of revolt, he meets the Diet at Worms to hear certain 
grievances, for '* there be above thirty bishops at variance with 
their temporal lords," and "to take notice of the books of 
Friar Martin Luther against the court of Rome." 

"Give the force of law to my bull," is the word from the 
pope. Nuncio Aleander speaks nine hours to show that Luther 
should be condemned at once, unheard and undefended; "for if 
the heresy be not stopped," he says, "Germany will be reduced 
to that frightful state of barbarism and desolation which the 
superstitious Mohammed has brought upon Asia." The elec- 
tors quake under this eloquence. But the business goes to a 
committee, and loses heat in the cooling -room. The wiser 
electors plead for the liberties of their states. They secure from 



394 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the emperor a safe-conduct for Luther to come and defend him- 
self. Will Luther retract? 

Thus the reformer has become a national, a European man. 
The Wittenberg circle has become Germanic. We can not 
ignore its first organizer, the gentle John Staupitz, to whom 
Luther wrote in 15 19: "God drags, and drives, and carries 
me on. I have no power over myself. I wish to be at rest, 
but am hurried forward in the tumult. . . . You forsake 
me far too much. I have been for days very sad on your ac- 
count, like a weaned child from its mother. Last night I 
dreamed that you were departing from me. I wept bitterly. 
You waved your hand for me to expect your return." Staupitz 
replied, "Come to Salzburg, and here let us live and die to- 
gether." Friendship had its peculiar sorrows in that separating 
time. Staupitz died in seclusion. The finis to his books was 
the prayer, "Jesus, I am thine, save me!" 

We have now before us, not merely circles of reformers 
within the old Church, but centers for the organization of the 
reforming Churches. External unity between the national 
Protestant Churches was not the rule. From the very start, 
the forces of Protestantism were not brought into a visibly uni- 
fied body. The reason is found in their circumstances. The 
imperative demand was for a defensive and aggressive warfare 
upon vice, ignorance, political injustice, wild schemes of reform, 
and the bigotry that would have no reform at all ; communism 
on the German side, and inquisitors on the Spanish border ; 
free thought without faith, and blind faith with no desire to 
think; and every -where Romanism so organized under the 
papacy that the grand commander, in St. Peter's name, felt 
able to summon kings and prelates, with legions of priests and 
monks, to crush the restorers of Peter's faith. All men who 
were loyal to the kingdom of truth must leap at once into the 
battle in their own towns. It was a fight for liberated homes, 
altars, and father-land. The promptness and single aim of the 
volunteers, and the political confusions of the time, scarcely 
permitted a general, organic union of the forces. In breaking 
away from the alleged center of unity they formed national 
centers of organization. Thus Protestantism was divided by 
the universal pressure of evils, by local interests, by jealous 
nationalities, language, forms of civil government; by conserv- 



1 



WORK OF PROTESTANTISM. 395 

atism here, by a radical spirit there ; by leaders acting inde- 
pendently of each other ; and by different opinions and rites, 
especially that of the eucharist. Yet the original agreement in 
theology and Church polity was remarkably close, and the 
bonds of spiritual union were strong. Early Protestantism had 
few diversities of type and system. Its one great aim was to 
restore on earth the kingdom of Christ.* 



*The three types, or forms, of Evangelical Protestantism, and their chief 
centers of influence: 

1. Luiheranism. It reconstructed the then existing Church on the principle 
of admitting whatever Churchly rites and symbols were not expressly forbidden 
in the Bible. Presbyterial or consistorial polity. Augustinian theology in the 
Augsburg Confession, 1530; but tendencies to (the later named) Arminianism in 
the Form of Concord, 1576-1584. Wittenberg the main center until 1560. 
Earlier leading reformers : Luther, Melancthon, Spalatin, Cruciger, Bugen- 
hagen (Pomeranus), J. Jonas, Brentz, Armsdorf, Flacius, Agricola. 

2. Calvinism, which included the more radical Zwinglian reform after 1535; 
the term "Reformed" was applied to its theology and national Churches. It 
admitted, in the main, only what the Bible required. It aimed at a nearer 
restoration of ■ the apostolic Church than even the Lutheran ; hence called 
"Reformed." Presbyteiial polity. Augustinian theology; "high Calvinism" 
in time of Beza. The Reformed (Calvinistic) Churches in various lands had 
each its own Confession. Main centers: (1) Zurich for German Switzerland, 
with Zwingli, Myconius, Leo Juda, Haller, CEcolampadius, and Bullinger. 
(2) Geneva for French Switzerland, France, the Netherlands until Dort, 1618, 
and Scotland until 1560 — with the reformers, Farel, Viret, Calvin, Beza, Bucer 
at Strasburg, and Knox in Scotland. 

3. Anglicanism. The old Church of England was re-formed, and its con- 
tinuity preserved in the English Protestant Church. The polity is prelatic 
episcopacy. Its early theology was Augustinian; after 1590 Arminianism caused 
a diversity of doctrine, but no change in the Thirty-nine Articles. The main 
centers were Oxford and especially Cambridge, with the transitional reformers, 
Grocyn, Colet, More, Erasmus, Cardinal Wolsey, and Fisher; and the fathers 
of Anglicanism, Thomas Cromwell, Tyndale, Frith, Coverdale, Bilney, Latimer, 
Barnes, Cranmer, Ridley, Jewell, Becon, Peter Martyr from Italy, Bucer of 
Strasburg for some years, Hooper, Hooker, Grindal, Parker, Whitgift, and 
Cartwright. 

Three evident facts : I. The theology of all the evangelical Protestants was 
Augustinian, with some diversities here and there, until the leading doctrines 
of the system advocated long before, and called afterwards Arminianism, reap- 
peared among Protestants about 1 565-1 575. 

2. Outside of the Anglican, Danish, and Swedish Churches, the ecclesias- 
tical polity of the earlier Protestants was presbyterial in its main features. The 
Lutheran superintendents, and so the Scottish in their brief day, were not pre- 
latic bishops. They were more like the Methodist bishops since the time of 
John Wesley. The form of Church government drawn up by Francis Lambert, 
1526, for the Churches of Hessia, was congregational, or a sort of independency. 



396 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

But it did not root itself there. This polity found ardent supporters among the 
English Puritans, some of whose exiles and pilgrims, early in the seventeenth 
century, organized under it with permanent results. It was then brought into 
modern history as a third Protestant system of Church government. The first 
reformers "were contending for the primitive Gospel, rather than the primitive 
Church polity." 

3. The continuity of the old Church in the new Churches. This appeared 
externally to be most fully preserved in England and Sweden, where the old 
prelatic polity was reformed, and each national Church freed from the papacy. 
But, if continuity be thought important, it may be found as real elsewhere. 
The Lutherans were not dependent on the organization of new congregations; 
they carried with them the old Churches of towns and of states ; and the pres- 
byterial succession was sufficiently continued ; for the priests of the old were 
the presbyters of the renewed system. So among the Zwinglians and Calvin- 
ists ; existing Churches, of free cities, of Cantons, of states or nationalities, 
went bodily out of Romanism into Protestantism, with their presbyters, pastors, 
and people, and denied that they were schismatics. In France the Huguenots 
had to organize new Churches. There, and in some other quarters great stress 
was laid upon two other sorts of continuity: (1) A spiricual, or vital. The 
visible Church had been Romanized and papalized ; yet in or about it there had 
been the invisible Church of God, consisting of all true believers and worshipers 
through all ages. (2) An organic, in the purer dissenters from Romanism, such 
as the Culdees, Albigenses, and Waldenses. Hence a vigorous effort to con- 
struct for them a historical succession from the days of Columba, Ambrose, and 
even Constantine. " It is an act of justice to vindicate the character of those 
whom the apostate Church of Rome stigmatized and persecuted as heretics and 
schismatics," says Dr. Cunningham (Hist. Theology, I, p. 449), who does not rely 
upon a visible and official succession. But such a history must rest, through 
many misty centuries, upon slender traditions, meager facts, and large infer- 
ences. Those who rely upon it to prove the continuity of the true and visible 
Church are entitled to their theory, their arguments, and their satisfaction. 
Most Protestants lay stress upon the spiritual continuity of the Church. 




CREEDS.— Lutheran: Augsburg Confession and 
Apologv, 1530; Smalcald Articles, 1537; Form of Con- 
cord, 1577. Calvinist: first Helvetic Confession, 1536 : 
second, 1566; Genevan, 15^1: French. T559; Scotch, 
1560; Belgic, 1561 ; Heidelberg Catechism, 1562; Ca- 
nons of Dort, "1618; Westminster Confession, 1645. 
Anglican 39 Articles. 1551-62. Roman Canons of 
Trent, 1545-63. .Racovian Catechisms, Socinian, 1574- 
160^. 




THE DIET OF WORMS. 397 



Chapter XVII. 

THE LUTHERAN REFORMATION. 

1521-1600. 

Two astonishing facts were before Europe: a pope had 
failed with his ban upon a monk ; the excommunicated monk 
was to be heard in his own defense before an emperor. These 
are notable marks in the progress of liberty. The days of 
Canossa are gone. The papacy is thrown into the shade. 
Charles V is given a peculiar position in Church affairs ; they 
become intricate, and involved in politics and wars. We now 
limit ourselves to those events which bear most directly upon 
the deliverance of the reform from Romanism, from political 
revolution, from fanaticism, and from dissolution. 

I. The Diet of Worms (1521) was a human affair; yet it 
was divinely ordered to bring out Luther's independence, and 
the sympathy of Germany for him ; to make ' ' the Lutheran 
cause" a definite power; to separate it from Roman rule and 
imperial patronage ; and to create a reformed Church. Luther's 
twelve days' ride to the old city of diets was a test of the 
popular sentiment. He was the only man whom foes or friends 
cared to see. One priest showed him a portrait of Savonarola, 
and said, "Stand firm, and God will stand by thee." All 
Erfurt turned out to greet him ; and he preached in the dear 
old convent -church, at the risk of forfeiting his passport. 
When near Worms, Spalatin came from Frederick to remind 
him of John Huss, and advise him not to go on. He replied: 
'•' Huss was burnt, but not the truth with him. I will go into 
Worms, though as many devils are aiming at me as there are 
tiles on the house-tops." At noon his rude farmer's wagon 
passed through the gate, and that old town had in it the two 
foremost men of Europe — Luther at his inn, praying with an 
open Bible before him, and Charles at his palace, bargaining 



398 history of the christian church. 

with the pope's nuncio, and reading the papal letters. Will 
the one recant ? Will the other be the tool of a baffled pope ? 

Amid the highest excitement in the streets and in the great 
hall, where five thousand people gathered, Luther found that 
he was not in Constance, nor in one of those general councils 
which innocent men had learned to abhor. He was calm, re- 
spectful, candid, keen in his exposures of papal tyranny, skillful 
in argument, willing to concede that he had sometimes been 
"more vehement than a Christian ought to be," but retracting 
nothing essential. The Diet was considerate and evinced a 
German justice to him. The papal legate began to act the 
inquisitor at the second hearing. "Well, then," said Luther, 
' ' if my answer is not full and fair, yQu shall have one plain 
enough. I believe things which are contrary to the pope and 
councils, for it is as clear as day that they have often erred. 
Let me then be refuted and convinced by the testimony of 
Scripture, or by the clearest arguments; otherwise I can not 
and will not recant, for it is neither safe nor expedient to act 
against conscience. Here I take my stand. I can not do oth- 
erwise ; God help me! Amen." That day's work was nobly 
done. The Saxon prophet announced the enduring basis, the 
true spirit, and the Divine Helper of Protestantism. 

The next day Emperor Charles informed the German princes, 
1 ' I shall proceed against Luther as an avowed heretic, and I 
expect you to support me." The papal party urged him to 
rescind the safe-conduct. His reply was, "I do not wish to 
blush as did Sigismund;" but thirty years afterward in his con- 
vent at Yuste, he regretted this fidelity to honor and duty. 
Charles ordered Luther to return to Wittenberg, and he started. 
Had he been like a warrior-bishop of the Middle Ages he might 
have had an army at a word, for Hutten and Francis of Sick- 
ingen were hovering about with troops, and on the walls of 
the Town Hall was found a placard stating that four hundred 
knights with eight thousand soldiers were ready to defend Lu- 
ther against the Romanists. It alarmed the papists. They 
cunningly waited until most of Luther's princely friends had 
gone home, and then worked through the Diet an edict which 
declared that, after twenty days of longer perversity, he should 
be under the ban of the empire and Church, as a heretic and 
outlaw ; his books to be burnt; press and pulpit forbidden him ; 



TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE— PROPHETS OF REVOLUTION. 399 

shelter and food and kindly words denied him ; his doctrines 
to be rooted out, and his followers reduced to submission ; all 
which might come to pass, if a torrent could be stopped by 
flinging on it a scroll of parchment. 

Luther, on his return from Worms, had been arrested in the 
Black Forest, by some friendly horsemen, and placed in the 
lonely castle of Wartburg. Thence went out some of the keen- 
est of controversial tracts. The better defense was spiritual 
aggression, and the noblest form of it was there begun in the 
translation of the Bible for the German people, the greatest 
literary work of all centuries for them. It was completed at 
Wittenberg in 1533, with the aid of Melancthon and Cruciger. 
It established their language, gave them a faith, started a varied 
literature, and struck so deep into the German intellect that 
even the ban of Duke George of Saxony was but a ripple on 
the stream of its national influence. It was Henry VIII of Eng- 
land who instigated the duke to forbid its circulation in his 
state. George found that his people must have the Bible. 
He promised a better version. He engaged Jerome Emser, 
ignorant of Greek and German, to construct it. With a flourish 
of trumpets it was sent out into the world. It illustrated the 
Jesuitic honesty of a man who audaciously took Luther's ver- 
sion, pictures and all, erased the original preface and notes, 
added some of his own, and then published it as his genuine 
translation ! Luther exposed him as ' ' this poor dealer in sec- 
ond-hand clothes." Tyndale's English version was treated in a 
quite similar way, that it might pass the criticism of King Henry. 

II. The Prophets of Revolution. They belong to the Defor- 
mation. The coals of the former Peasant Wars were still alive. 
The decree from Worms was breath and fuel to them. Most 
of the Germans would rather read Luther's books than to burn 
them. Many of the social revolutionists hoped to find in him 
a leader. Bands of communistic spirits usually called Anabap- 
tists,* raised their voices. At Zwickau, on the Bohemian bor- 
der, the weaver Claus Storch and his comrades assumed to be 
inspired. They wanted no priests, nor Bible, nor churchly 
order. He and other of these prophets, expelled from Zwickau 

* If they, or any of them, can be proven to have been worthy fathers of 
the present Baptists (some of whom are hopeful of the evidence), so much the 
better for the Anabaptists, and for future historians. 



I 



400 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

came to Wittenberg, where Carlstadt had taken some steps 
in the right direction. He had changed the mass to the 
Lord's Supper,* and restored the cup to the laity, abolished 
private confession and various ceremonies, but he knew not 
where to stop. He joined hands with the new prophets and 
exceeded them in his claims to miraculous inspiration. Learn- 
ing was declared to be useless. Many students left the uni- 
versity to wander and preach this fanaticism, or remained to 
engage in riots. The iconoclasts broke the painted windows and 
the statues in the churches. Melancthon was at his wits' end. 

III. The Loci Communes. These "Common Places," fresh 
from the quiet study of Melancthon, in 1 521, were hailed by Eras- 
mus as an army of doctrines sharply opposed to the scholastics 
and Pharisees. Nothing like so complete a systematic theology 
had ever appeared, f It had no rival through fourteen years. 
Then it amicably joined with Calvin's Institutes in establishing 
a theological system on the basis of the inspired Word. Its au- 
thor saw it pass through sixty editions, one of them in French, 
by Calvin. It gave materials for the Lutheran symbols. 

IV. Luther again at Wittenberg. He had not objected to 
the first mild changes there. To know that his brother monks 
had abandoned masses, and celibacy, and convent, was not an 
offense to him. But when the essential principles of reform, 
of faith, of worship, of holiness, were all going in the whirl- 
wind, he resolved to escape from his retreat at the risk of his 
life. Duke Frederick warned him not to expose himself. 
Duke George of Leipsic might seize him. "I'll go if it rains 
Duke Georges nine days," said he, and throwing himself upon 
divine protection he was soon in Wittenberg, welcomed by those 
who had thought he would never come back. Order was re- 
stored. The prophets were expelled. In the Church services 
Luther now adopted the principle that all religious rites and 
usages which were not opposed to some clear statement of 
God's Word were admissible. Certain mediaeval rites and 
customs were retained. 



* Carlstadt held that it was merely a commemorative rite, the bread and 
wine being mere symbols of the body and blood of Christ : the view of John 
Scotus, and probably of Erasmus. It is often imputed to Zwingli. 

tin 1832 the Princeton IZeview described it as "a model which might do 
honor to the brightest age of Scriptural investigation." 



WARS. 401 

V. The Reform was charged with the evils of three military 
enterprises. (1) The Knights' War was headed by Francis of 
Sickingen, who besieged Treves in order to punish the arch- 
bishop for his sins against God and the emperor, and to give 
to the people freedom from the pope and the priests. He was 
driven into one of his castles : it was battered down, and he 
was slain (1523). His comrade, Ulric Hutten, fled, and died 
the object of Zwingli's charity. In his place Luther ought to 
have been poet-laureate. 

(2) The Peasants' War was far more extended. The whole 
country drained by the head-waters of the Rhine and Dan- 
ube was involved in a series of revolts. The old spirit of the 
serfs rose against their feudal lords and the clergy. They told 
how they were robbed of the game in the forests, the fish in 
the streams, and wages on farms and in towns, and how they 
must ever be raising money for the priests. "At baptism, 
money; at bishoping, money; at marriage, money; for confes- 
sion, money — not even extreme unction without money" — and 
poor souls must suffer on in purgatory for want of money. 

The mind of Thomas ]\Iunz_er gave organic form to these 
movements. He was, like Luther, a Thuringian ; he was gifted 
with a rude eloquence that gave him great ascendency over the 
boors and burghers of the region. He joined Stork and the 
Anabaptists from a sympathy with their notion that Luther was" 
not going fast and far enough in reforming the Church. When 
Stork was driven from Wittenberg, he seems to have taken 
refuge with Munzer in the imperial city of Muhlhausen. There 
Munzer, who had been driven from one place to another, took 
his abode. By eloquence and management, he got control of 
the city councils, became actual ruler, banished the old magis- 
trates, established a community of goods, and caused a reign 
of terror in all that country. In other places robbers were 
leaders, and Dr. Carlstadt a fit preacher. It was this fanatic 
who now threw the Lutherans and Zwinglians into the rend- 
ing controversy upon the Lord's Supper.* The sacrament of 
Christ's atoning love and union was to be a theme of discord 



*The term consubstantiation is usually given to Luther's doctrine of the 
Eucharist. But John Gerhard (1582-1637) wrote, "We neither believe in im- 
panation, nor consubstantiation, nor any physical or local presence whatsoever." 
Dr. Krauth (1876) says, "We affirm . . . that these sacramental objects, to 

26 



402 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

among the reformers. To war in the Church this man would 
add war in the state. So he cast his lot with the chieftain who 
subscribed his fiery proclamations thus: "Thomas Munzer, 
servant of God against the wicked;" and who inflamed the 
peasantry with these words: " Be pitiless. Heed not the groans 
of the impious. Rouse up the towns and villages; above all, 
the miners of the mountains. On ! on ! while the fire is burn- 
ing, and the hot sword reeking with slaughter. Kill all the 
proud ones. While they reign over you it is no use to talk of 
God !" It was a war for communism of the most immoral sort. 
It was ended by the battle at Frankenhausen, in 1525, where 
Munzer was beheaded, as a rebel, and not as a heretic* 

About one hundred thousand peasants are thought to have 
perished in these revolts. By Luther's kindly mediation Carl- 
stadt returned to more moderate views. He ended his days 
as a professor and preacher at Basle (1541), but he served to 
connect those excesses unjustly with the reform. The real 
authors of them were the dominant powers at the Diet of 
Worms. To the nobles Luther had said, "You must moderate 
your despotism." But when the peasants reveled in wine cel- 
lars, broke into convents, and set castles on fire, he so de- 
nounced them that he is said to have checked "the whole 
democratic movement of the time." 

Another military movement (3), that of the league between 
certain reformed princes, was not so entirely evil. It was largely 
defensive of the Lutheran cause. It was provoked by a Roman 
Catholic league formed at Nuremberg between the new pope, 



wit, the true body and true blood of Jesus Christ, are truly present in the Lord's 
Supper." Zwingli held that the bread and wine are memorials of Christ's death, 
and means of sanctifying grace ; that in the sacrament believers receive Christ 
spiritually. 

* Luther said, "The pen, not the fire, is to put down heretics. The hang- 
men are not doctors of theology. ... If the Word does not put down 
error, error will stand, though the world were drenched with blood." He pit- 
ied the wretched peasants, but condemned their method of seeking relief from 
political oppression. "The story of their communistic struggles fills four sepa- 
rate chapters in the history of the period: (i) the uprising under Munzer and 
Stork, which centered at Miihlhausen in Thuringia ; (2) the Anabaptist struggle 
in Switzerland, especially at Zurich ; (3) the Anabaptists' colonization of Mora- 
via under Hutter ; and (4) the terrible closing scenes of the communist tragedy 
at Munster, where John of Leyden was leader and ruler, with the fruitless 
attempt to seize the city of Amsterdam." Note I. 






REFORMS. 403 

Hadrian VI,* and the Romanist princes, in order to root out 
Lutheranism. The Reformed League was headed by John 
(Frederick's successor and brother) and Philip of Hesse — men 
intensely earnest for the good cause. In 1526, at Spires, they 
secured this admirable measure, that no German state should 
be compelled to enforce the decree against Luther ; each state 
might do as it chose. Of course, Luther would be kept within 
the friendly states, and Lutheranism could work its way by 
moral force. These reformed princes began to reform or repress 
monasteries, and turn the revenues to the support of schools 
or of preaching. Monks and nuns were allowed to marry. 
The Church services were generally conformed to those of 
Wittenberg. All this went on prosperously while the Di- 
vine Providence kept the emperor in Italy, quarreling with 
Pope Clement VII, and sacking Rome.t One wrote, "Such 
is the empire of Jesus Christ, that the emperor pursuing 
Luther on behalf of the pope, is constrained to ruin the pope 
instead of Luther." But when Charles and Clement adjusted 
their quarrel, they did not forget the older alliance against 
Germany. 

VI. The Protestants. The Diet of Spires, in 1529, re- 
enacted the edict of Worms, forbidding all further reforms 
until a General Council should be held. Luther must be again 
under the ban of pope and empire. This soon brought the 
reformed princes to Spires, with their memorable protest, which 
gave them the name of Protestants. The Turks seemed to 
have their protest, for they marched westward and laid siege to 
Vienna. So the emperor was again drawn away from the 

* A poor boy of Utrecht, professor at Louvain, tutor of Charles V, pious 
Dominican, learned Thomist, not Hildebrandine in his papal theories, eager to 
reform the Church and to repress the Lutheran heresy. His papal reign was 
too short (1522-3) to effect much reform. 

t From the windows of the castle of St. Angelo Clement might see the Ger- 
mans acting an alarming satire. They formed a procession, and marched 
through the streets to the castle. One was attired like a pope ; others as cardi- 
nals ; all on horses caparisoned in papal style. Their pontiff made a speech; 
rehearsed the evils and wars caused by the real popes; thanked Providence for 
raising up Charles V to avenge papal crimes and bridle the priests; and then 
solemnly promised to transfer all his authority to Martin Luther, who would 
refit the Ship of Peter and man it with better men. "All who agree to this, 
hold up your hands," said he; and up they went with the shout, "Long live 
Pope Luther !" 



404 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

reformers. ''Let there be unity against the common foe," 
said Luther, and so Lutheran and Romanist patriotically joined 
in the defense of the father-land. 

VII. The ecclesiastical polity. Each reformed prince con- 
trolled affairs within his own bounds ; hence a union of Church 
and state was continued. Few German bishops were converted 
early enough to Protestantism to conserve prelacy. The lead- 
ing reformers were simple presbyters ; hence a presbyterial 
system was natural. Reformed pastors brought over many 
of their Churches with them, or a state voted them all into 
Protestantism. The polity was framed chiefly by Melancthon 
and two or three civilians. It began, in 15.27,* with the 
famous Saxon Visitation, which had been urged by Luther 
and ordered by Elector John. The province was divided into 
four districts. Each was canvassed by two ministers and three 
laymen. Luther had Saxony proper and Melancthon took 
Misnia. They were to inspect the morals and abilities of all 
teachers, monks, and pastors ; to remove the unworthy and fill 
vacancies ; to establish schools in all parishes, and afford sound 
preaching to all the people ; to supply rules of discipline and 
fix salaries, or grant benefices from property secured to the 
Protestants ; to deal tenderly with the ignorant, infirm, aged, 
and those of honest prejudices ; to admonish the unfaithful 
and, if they did not reform, report them to the civil authorities 
for correction ; and to harmonize the churches in a common 
worship and faith. They retained much of the old system, 
many saints' days, clerical vestments, and rites, of which Me- 
lancthon wrote, ''There is no harm in them, whatever Zwingli 
may say." Other princes ordered visitations, and the reform 
was made effective. 

To promote this work superintendents were appointed over 
districts, either by the civil power or by the clergy. The elec- 
tion of pastors by the people came to be limited by patrons or 
by consistories. To educate both clergy and laity Luther pre- 
pared his two catechisms. The first German consistory was 
formed in 1539 at Wittenberg. Two of its six ministers were 
professors of theology ; the two laymen, or elders, were doctors 
of law. It had judicial power. It was virtually a presbytery. 

* This was four years after Zwingli had introduced a more thorough presby- 
terial system at Zurich. 



THE CONFESSION OF AUGSBURG. 405 

It was adopted wherever Lutheranism prevailed, except in 
prelatic Sweden. 

VIII. The Confession of Augsburg. The new Charlemagne, 
now so dutiful to the pope, must repress the Saxons, not as 
heathen, but worse, as heretics. " Enforce the Edict of 
Worms," was his now monotonous demand at the Diet 
of Augsburg, 1530, whither Luther would have gone had his 
friends permitted. He was not far off in Coburg Castle, im- 
parting courage to Melancthon by letters, and singing, Eine 
fesie Berg; 

A safe stronghold our God is still, 
A trusty shield and weapon. 

He was fully consulted while Melancthon was drawing up 
the famous Apology, which was meant to be a provisional 
defense, and not a permanent creed. Its framer often revised 
it afterwards, and treated it as his own summary of doctrines. 
But princes and people received it as the confession of their 
faith. It gave them more organic unity. It is still the most 
popular symbol of the Lutheran Churches.* 

The reforming princes went home from the diet entirely 
unsubmissive to the orders and threats of Emperor Charles. 
The Turks again drew him away from Germany. The princes 
formed the Protestant League of Smalcald, 1531, and went on 
leaguing and staving off civil war until Luther was gone to 
his rest. 

IX. In 1546 death changed the Protestant leadership in Ger- 
many. Wittenberg had become a model Protestant city. 
There Luther preached, lectured, commented on Scripture, 
wrote great folios, married a released nun — the most excellent 
Catharine Von Bora — loved his children and neighbors, and 
made his home blissful with song, hospitality, and never- 
forgotten table-talk, f There he curbed his high temper by 

*It was preceded in 1529 by the Articles of Marburg, Schwabach, and 
Torgau. For other Lutheran symbols see Note III. To this Diet of Augsburg 
Zwingli sent his " Ratio Fidei" and Martin Bucer presented the " Confessio Teira- 
politana" or Confession of the four cities of Strasburg, Cosnitz, Memmingen, 
and Lindau. These cities, in 1532, adopted the Augsburg Confession, for it 
then seemed likely to be subscribed by nearly all the (later called) Calvinists. 

T"Nine nuns came to me yesterday, who had escaped from their imprison- 
ment in the convent of Nimptschen," wrote Luther, April 6, 1523. They had 
read some of his writings. "I greatly pity these poor girls. . . . They es- 
caped in the most surprising manner. [Rode in a wagon on a rainy night to 



406 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

prayer, uttered words of light and flame, wrote hymns which 
still ring in Christendom, kindled a literary spirit in his people, 
and died at Eisleben in his sixty-third year. He was buried at 
Wittenberg, and even Charles V would not allow his grave to 
be desecrated by the soldiers when they captured the city. 

The Germanic leadership passed to Melancthon, who adhered 
to the maxim, "In essentials unity; in doubtful things liberty, 
and in all things charity." In trying to harmonize religious 
parties he may have increased their number, and added to them 
his followers — the Philippists. He was traveling to the Council 
of Trent, in 155 1, when a war sent him back to his home, his 
good wife, children, books, and restless pen. 

His hearty alliance with Calvin favored the planting of the 
Genevan system in many of the German states, but added heat 
there to theological controversies. Yet when the hail of cen- 
sure falls upon his grave at Wittenberg, there comes to us the 
lament of Calvin, in an outburst of heart when he is writing 
one of his severest tracts, in 1560: "O Philip, now living with 
Christ, and waiting for us until we shall be gathered with thee 
into that blessed rest! A hundred times, worn with labors and 
cares, thou didst lay thy head upon my breast and say, ' Would 
to God that I might die here on thy heart!' And I, a thou- 
sand times since, have earnestly wished that we might be 
together. Certainly thou wouldst have been more valiant to 
face danger, stronger to despise hatred, and bolder to disregard 
false accusations. The wickedness of many would have been 
restrained, and their audacious insults would not have fallen 
upon thee for what they called thy weakness." 

X. The evangelical states of Germany, deep in the wars of 
their league, had no religious peace from those truces called 
Interims. The Augsburg Interim of the emperor, 1548, was 

Wittenberg.] Pray beg some money of your rich courtiers to enable me to 
support them a week or two, until I can restore them to their parents, or to 
friends who promise to take care of them if their parents do not." (April io, 
1523.) The next year he threw oft" his monk's dress, and "when I was thinking 
of other affairs, the Lord brought me suddenly to a marriage with Catharine, 
the nun." When reproached for this, he "hoped that his humiliation would 
rejoice the angels and vex the devils." During a severe illness in 1527, he prayed, 
"Lord God, I have neither house, nor land, nor possessions to leave. Thou hast 
given me a wife and children; preserve them as thou hast taken care of me." 
His letters to " Doctress Kate" and their children overflow with love, humor, 
and genial piety. 



ELECTOR MAURICE. 407 

more than half papal, and was intended for the interval 
before the Council of Trent* should settle affairs for all 
Europe. Armies tried to enforce it. In Southern Germany 
four hundred faithful preachers, with their wives and children, 
wandered about starving and shelterless. In the north there 
was a stronger resistance. Fugitives from all quarters found 
refuge in Magdeburg. There alone, in "God's chancery," the 
press was free to oppose the Romanizing scheme, and tracts, 
satires, and caricatures fell upon Germany like Autumn leaves, 
to increase the fires of debate. The Protestant princes, who 
sought relief at the resumed Council of Trent, 155 1, found that 
compromises with Rome were simply nets for their entrapment. 
The Reformation never appeared more hopeless. "Bound by 
the fetters of the Interim, it seemed like a culprit on whom 
the sentence of death was to be passed." 

In Saxony the Elector Maurice, with the aid of Melancthon, 
put forth the Leipsic Interim, 1548, which seemed to be only 
half Protestant. It kindled a strife about "things indifferent, "f 
and evoked the disgust and hatred of Protestants, who chose to 
endure imprisonment rather than restore the old Romish usages. 
Calvin and his supporters wrote against both Interims, and 
"Crypto-Calvinism" brought a more heroic, unflinching spirit 
into the German states, where it fought hard and long for the 
right of existence. X 

XI. Elector Maurice and the Treaties of Peace. Germany 
was fettered by the Augsburg Interim. Magdeburg was the 
one bulwark of Protestant liberty. It was under the ban and 
interdict of the emperor so far as wrath on paper could make 
it. He was by the Divine Providence hedged in at Innspruck, 
and he could not lead in the storming of Magdeburg. Just 
when the hopes of all Protestants were centered on that 
brave, outlawed, long besieged city, Maurice betrayed them, 
and joined the storming forces (1 5.50-1), in order to execute the 
imperial ban. But he could not endure the German aversion 
to himself, nor the rigorous demands of Charles. The city 



*It held sessions, with many adjournments, from 1543 to 1563. 

t Adiaphora, among which were the pope's jurisdiction, seven sacraments, 
images, saints' days, and good works. But the doctrine of justification by faith 
was not surrendered. 

% Notes II and III. 



408 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

yielded to him. He then threw off the mask, betrayed the 
emperor, said that he would not be trampled down by priests 
and Spaniards, flung the Interim to the winds, liberated Ger- 
many, and marched for Innspruck "to catch the fox in his 
lair." Charles barely escaped on a stormy night. Sick, humil- 
iated, forsaken, he fled over the snow-covered mountains into a 
hiding-place whence no one heard his old cry, "Enforce the 
edict of Worms." And so ended his toil of thirty years to 
wipe out German Protestantism. 

Maurice entered Innspruck and secured the Treaty of Passau. 
1 55 1,* and released from prison such princes as John of Saxony 
and Philip of Hesse. Preachers came home from exile. Soon 
Protestants and Romanists were fighting as patriots on the side 
of a common liberty. The Religious Peace of Augsburg, 1555, 
gained under the emperor's fallen crest, secured mutual toler- 
ation to the Romanists and Lutherans in Germany, or rather 
to their princes, who might compel their subjects to adopt their 
own creed. But it did not grant tolerance to the German 
Reformed Churches — the Zwinglians and Calvinists — and for it 
they must wait nearly a century. This unjust reservation did 
not prevent what is termed the Calvinizing of several German 
states, f It helped to sectarianize European Protestantism. 
Immense evils grew out of it. Yet it marks the close of an 
epoch from the rise to the establishment of the Reformation in 
Germany. 

Melancthon, dying in 1560, said: "For two reasons I desire 
to leave this life. First, that I may enjoy the sight of the Son 
of God and the Church in Heaven. Next that I may be set 
free from the monstrous fury of the theologians." He did not 
undervalue theology, for it was his favorite science. He saw 
its vast benefit to Protestantism. But he feared that the eight 
or nine controversies already stormy would lead the people 
away from the essentials of faith and from spiritual life; and 
that a new race of schoolmen would befog all really scientific 



*This closed the emperor's Thirty Years' War (1521-51), but it and the 
next Treaty of 1555 left enormous evils in both Churches and states, which grew 
on until they caused another Thirty Years' War (1618-48), the most terrible 
chapter in the modern history of Germany. The prince-bishops, who controlled 
certain large cities, and the Jesuits held some provinces of Germany under 
Romanism. See Chapter XIX, under Jesuits. 

t See Chapter XVIII, Section IX. 



DENMARK. 409 

theology. Ten years after he was gone the German Reforma- 
tion was imperiled by bitter contentions. To save it and unify 
the Lutherans the Form of Concord (1576) was put forth. * 
But little fires were simply brought into a larger conflagration. 
And still Protestantism was not a failure in Germany; not 
in the Christian faith which it brought to the people, the house- 
hold altars restored, the love by Winter firesides, the bliss at 
harvestings, the songs that rang in churches ; not in sanctifying 
the popular spirit of freedom inherent in the race, nor in direct- 
ing Teutonic energies to higher civilization and literary culture 
and universal science. Creeds might divide theologians and 
philosophies make parties, but Luther's Bible was greater than 
all of them, for it passed into nearly every home and brought 
faithful readers into "the glorious company of the apostles, 
the goodly fellowship of the prophets, and the holy Church 
throughout all the world." To give a nation the example of 
Luther's domestic bliss was worth all that looked like wasted 
effort in the Reformation. To empty convents and fill pulpits 
with men of truth and pastorates with shepherds who cared for 
the flock, was a triumph which no revival of ritualism can turn 
back or nullify. 

The Extension of Lutheranism. 

We shall briefly survey "the bursting forth of Luther's 
spirit into states and countries not included in the German 
Empire." Luther's writings were borne into various lands and 
found readers in all Europe, even where Lutheranism did not 
assume a distinct form. He and Melancthon lectured to stu- 
dents from nearly all countries. Monks became preachers, and 
went far as missionaries, especially the Augustines. 

I. Prussia, then the country south of the Baltic, had long 
been under the control of the Teutonic knights, who had 
brought it within the pale of Christianity. Albert, the grand- 
master of the order and Prince of Brandenburg, admitted the 
Lutheran preachers, in 1522, within his province. Their suc- 
cess was rapid and marked. The bishop, George Polentz, was 
the first German prelate who became earnest for reform. The 
whole country was converted into a Protestant dukedom. The 
convents were changed into hospitals. In 1544 the University 



* See Notes II, III. The Calvinists had already put forth distinctive creeds. 



410 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of Konigsberg was established to educate preachers for the 
independent Prussian Church. 

II. Denmark was opened to the reform by King Christern 
II, who opposed the national party of Roman priests. At his 
request, in 1520, Martin Reinhard was sent to him from Wit- 
tenberg. He met with success until the papal clergy expelled 
him and an assistant monk. Carlstadt went, but only increased 
the troubles. A revolution drove Christern to Saxony, where 
he was led by Luther to adopt the Reformation more heartily, 
and his wife (the emperor's sister) became an earnest convert. 
They secured a Danish translation of the New Testament, and 
circulated it in their realm. But this king, wishing the political 
aid of Charles V, abjured the reformed faith at Augsburg 
(1530), and by this means conquered Norway. He was soon 
thrown into prison, repented of his apostasy, studied the Danish 
Bible, and depended upon his son, Christern, to press forward 
the work. When he came to the disputed throne he was 
crowned by Pomeranius (Bugenhagen), who was brought for the 
purpose from Wittenberg. The old clergy Avere seized, impris- 
oned, deposed, and superintendents were appointed in their 
place. Their property and revenues were confiscated to the 
crown. The monasteries were converted to Protestant uses. 
The Augsburg confession and Lutheran liturgy were adopted. 
The University of Copenhagen was reorganized, and Christern 
III was recognized as the royal father of the National Church 
of Denmark. From this country the reformation extended to 
Norway and Iceland. 

III. Sweden had freed itself from the Danish yoke, and 
been put under ban by Pope Leo X; but Christern II had re- 
conquered it, and at his coronation put to slaughter six hun- 
dred of its noblest men, whom the archbishop pointed out as 
the enemies of the Danes. This roused the national spirit, so 
that, as soon as this new king had gone home, Gustavus Vasa 
returned from exile, expelled the Danes (1521), and was elected 
the rightful king. During his wanderings he had become in- 
clined to the Reformation. Olaf and Lawrence Peterson had 
studied at Wittenberg, returned to their native land, and begun 
their glorious work. One became the preacher at Stockholm ; 
the other a professor of theology in the University of Upsal. 
Bishop Lawrence Anderson entered into the movement. These 



SWEDEN— BOHEMIA AND MORAVIA. 41 1 

men gave the Bible to the Swedes in their own language. At 
one of the disputations King Gustavus, seated on his horse, 
discoursed on the uselessness of the Latin service, and suggested 
that the monastic orders be abolished. The Roman party was 
• still strong. At one of the diets he said, ' ' Either adopt the 
Reformation, or accept my resignation of the crown." The 
clergy violently opposed any reform of the Church, for they 
were rich. Gustavus left the assembly, weeping over the lack 
of a national spirit in his people. Then the laymen and the 
nobles felt the stir of liberty in their souls, and a love for their 
king, who was their strong defense against the Danish power. 
They rose up in their majesty and might, broke from the bonds 
of the clergy, and did not rest until Gustavus resumed the scep- 
ter. The states yielded to his wishes. They gave him all the 
power that he could ask. They deprived the bishops of their 
strongholds and their revenues, suppressed the monasteries, and 
organized the Swedish Church upon the Lutheran basis (1554), 
except that episcopacy was retained, along with many of the 
mediaeval rites. There were insurrections and reactions ; the 
Jesuits labored busily; but in 1593 the Augsburg Confession 
was established. 

IV. Bohemia and Moravia had given birth to the Hussites, 
who claimed to be already reformed. They were among the 
first to correspond with Luther, who at length offered the 
hand of fellowship to the United Brethren. Their delegates con- 
ferred with him. One result was their Confession, in 1535, pre- 
sented to their king, Ferdinand. They sent volunteers into the 
Smalcaldic War, and for this were bitterly persecuted. One 
thousand of them sought refuge in Prussia and Poland. But a 
party opposed to Lutheranism grew up, and sought alliance 
with the Calvinists. Both systems were admitted into the 
country, which became almost entirely Protestant. The Jesuits, 
however, produced a great reaction, so that in 1627 Protest- 
antism was nearly suppressed. 

V. In Hungary the truths of the Gospel were taught by 
Waldenses, Hussites, and students who returned from Witten- 
berg zealous for the doctrines of Luther. Simon Grynaus, 
professor at Ofen, was imprisoned for preaching them. Earnest 
monks had more success. Whole towns and parishes declared 
for the reform, in the face of persecutions. Had Queen Mary, 



412 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the sister of the emperor, and the correspondent of Luther, re- 
mained to protect the reform, it would have been more rapidly 
advanced. As regent in the Netherlands she at first favored 
''the Lutheran religion," very much to the displeasure of the 
papal nuncio. She had to be taught this error! The Hunga- 
rian Luther was Matthew Devay, who suffered in prison, dwelt 
for some time in Luther's own house, at Wittenberg, translated 
the New Testament for his people, and adopted the Zwinglian 
view of the Lord's Supper. The larger part of the Hungarian 
Protestants indorsed the Swiss Confession (1557), but the Ger- 
man colonists adhered to that of Augsburg. Another party 
ran into Socinianism. The Jesuits began to undermine Prot- 
estantism by winning the ruling families back to their creed. 
They employed education as their means of gaining the princes 
and nobles. But they made Hungary a land of heroes and 
martyrs for the Word of God. The Reformation, which had 
virtually triumphed, was almost overthrown, until the year 1781 
brought "perfect freedom for the Protestants." No other land 
furnishes a more complete illustration of the arts and victories 
of Jesuitism over the Reformed Church. But the true light went 
out from Hungary into neighboring countries. The reform in 
Transylvania has a similar history, only that toleration came 
at an earlier day (1571), granting equal liberty to Lutherans, 
Calvinists, Romanists, and Socinians. 

VI. Poland had never been strongly devoted to the papacy. 
Waldenses and Hussites had fostered the Slavonic spirit of 
independence. Students were educated at Wittenberg, and Po- 
lish nobles employed them as teachers and preachers. In 1524 
the leading cities of Prussian Poland — Dantzig, Elbing, and 
Thorn — declared for the Reformation. One of the chief reform- 
ers was John a Lasko, a nobleman destined to the priesthood, 
a student under Erasmus at Basle, and a man of independent 
thought. After 1526 he labored eleven years to secure a reform 
in Poland, on the Erasmian basis, but failed. He traveled, met 
with Zwingli and Cranmer, preached to foreign residents in 
London and Frankfort, superintended the work in Friesland, 
and in 1556 he was called back to his native land by King 
Sigismund. He lived four years longer, earnestly seeking to 
unite the reformed parties, and translate the Bible. A union 
in the consensus of Sendomir was effected (1570), but it did not 



THE UNITARIANS— SPAIN. 413 

heal the dissensions. The Jesuits were the common foe against 
whom the Protestants did not join hands in vigorous efforts to 
educate the people and retain the ruling classes. 

Poland became the refuge of the Unitarians, who had 
scarcely been tolerated in other lands, and who were brought 
into unity by Lselius and Faustus Socinus of Italy. The doc- 
trine of the Trinity had been opposed by Martin Cellarius of 
Wittenberg ; by Gentilis, Blandrata, and Servetus, who had 
resided for a time at Geneva, and by several Anabaptists. 
Free-thinkers had also appeared at Venice and other cities of 
Italy, but the chief of the Italian school was Laelius Socinus, 
a learned jurist of Siena, who spent some years among the 
reformers at Zurich, Basle, Geneva and other cities, and grad- 
ually developed his belief. He held that Jesus Christ was a 
mere man, supernaturally endowed with gifts and power to 
achieve the salvation of men, who only needed a moral exam- 
ple, a true teacher, and a new impulse towards a holy life ; yet 
the man Jesus, having accomplished his work, is rewarded with 
an exaltation to divine majesty, and granted power to judge the 
world ; hence divine honors are due him. The Holy Ghost is 
only a power of God. The elder Socinus went to Poland, and 
sought to unite the various parties of Unitarians in his views 
(1560), but left the work to his nephew, Faustus Socinus, who 
was successful. For this society the city of Racow was built. 
There they had collegiate and printing establishments. They 
planted Churches in various cities. They issued the Racovian 
Catechism (1602), and flourished until they were expelled from 
Poland in 1638, and found refuge in other lands, where Socin- 
ianism has ever since existed in varying forms. 

VII. Spain received the writings of Luther at an early day, 
through the attendants of Charles V, one of whom was his 
chaplain, Virves, and another was his secretary, Alfonso 
Valdes. The new doctrines were hailed with joy in a country 
where the Inquisition would continue its work of inhuman craft 
and destruction. Roderigo de Valero abandoned his dissipa- 
tions, studied the Holy Word, and taught it at Seville with 
great success. The most famous of his disciples was the Bishop 
Juan Egidius, who formed societies for Biblical study. These 
men were severely punished by the inquisitors; and who in 
Spain was not, if he ventured upon a new opinion? Enzina 



414 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

translated the New Testament ; it was prohibited, and he was 
imprisoned. There was no open attack made upon the papal 
system ; the converts to the revived faith were content to teach 
the simple truths of the Gospel as quietly as possible. They 
had secret Churches organized at Seville and Valladolid. About 
1555 there seem to have been two thousand of them in various 
parts of Spain, united in doctrine, and holding private meet- 
ings. The papists took alarm. The Emperor Charles V, in 
his convent at Yuste, gave attention to the heresy. The en- 
gines of the Inquisition were called into most active use. Mul- 
titudes were burnt, or left to die in dungeons. 

Philip II believed that he was predestined to subdue free 
thought and Protestant faith. The only safety for the readers 
of the Bible, or of "Lutheran books," was flight. Julian Fer- 
nandez, the little deacon, active, heroic, and shrewd, had traded 
between Spain and France, dressed as a muleteer, and in pack- 
ages of goods had concealed the writings of the reformers, 
which he delivered to men of learning and rank in the chief 
cities of Spain. He was burnt, not having betrayed a single 
one of his truth -loving customers. An English ship -master 
sailed into Cadiz with a rich cargo ; he was seized, found to be 
"a contumacious Lutheran heretic," and burnt alive ; so that 
the Inquisition at Seville gained about two hundred and fifty 
thousand dollars by this Auto-da-fe ; for the Holy Office 
claimed all the property of its victims. Among the exiles was 
Juan Valdes, who went to Naples, taught the Gospel to a 
circle of friends, and wrote his ' ' One Hundred and Ten Consid- 
erations," affirming Protestant doctrines. These are but sam- 
ples of countless thousands who were crushed by the Holy 
Tribunal, the only prosperous institution in a land, of which 
one of her recent historians says, "The Inquisition ruined 
Spain." It postponed the work of reform until, the present 
century.* 

VIII. In Italy the history of incipient Protestantism is also 
that of martyrs and exiles by means of the Inquisition, which 
the popes sought to make universal. Cardinal Baronius said to 



*" Under Philip III (1598-1621) there were in Spain nine hundred and 
eighty-eight nunneries and thirty-two thousand mendicant friars. The number 
of monasteries trebled between 1574 and 1624, and the number of monks in- 
creased in a yet greater ratio." (Roscher, Polit. Economy.) 



PALEARIO. 415 

Paul V (1605-21), "Blessed Father, the ministry of Peter is 
twofold — to feed and to slay. For the Lord said to him, ' Feed 
my sheep,' and a voice from heaven also said, 'Slay and eat.' 
This was not the first torture of Holy Scripture to authorize 
the Inquisition, which had been terrible at Venice for four cent- 
uries. Yet that was one of the cities in which were clubs of 
learned men and women, studying the Bible, reading the con- 
traband books of Luther and Zwingli, and hoping to be justi- 
fied by faith. In the time of Pope Paul IV (1559-65) spies 
prowled every-where, and the newly built prisons of the Inqui- 
sition at Rome were crowded. A cardinal said that Italy was 
full of Lutherans. None dared to breathe a murmur at the 
severity of the Holy Tribunal, nor whisper a word of pity for 
the sufferers. Even the cardinals trembled when their brother, 
Morone, was imprisoned on the charge of heresy; thereafter 
Contarini, Sadolet, and Pole, the English prince, gave little 
more promise of leading a reforming party. Pietro Carne- 
secchi, a man of noble family, great learning, and high office, 
was burnt alive, and great terror every-where prevailed. 

But a more positive work had been going on in various 
quarters where the writings of the German and Swiss reformers 
were circulated. Bruccioli translated the Bible (1530), and it 
was prohibited. Moratus and his brilliant daughter Olympia 
were ornaments of the cause. In this circle of learned men 
was the lawyer and classical professor, Aonio Paleario, who is 
credited with the authorship of the little book on the ' ' Benefit 
of Christ's Death," which would have honored an Anselm or a 
Luther. It is said that forty thousand copies of it were printecl 
at Venice, and these were so burnt in heaps and swept away 
that it was long thought to be lost forever. It has been found, 
and thousands of copies are again in circulation in Christendom. 
Paleario died a martyr, in 1570, after many of his friends had 
escaped to other lands. Peter Martyr Vermiglio taught in 
several Protestant cities, and at Oxford took his place among 
the leading English reformers. The Duchess Renee (child of 
Louis XII of France) made her court at Ferrara a home for the 
reformers, until persecution and her return to France closed its 
doors to the Gospel. The reform in Italy was suspended until 
the nineteenth century. 

Many Italian refugees, with their families, went into the 



416 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Grison Republic, which belonged to the Swiss League, but was 
Italian in language. There Comander imitated Zwingli, and at 
Coire (Chor) established a presbyterial system. After 1537 
there was a national synod. The poor Grisons were astonished 
to find in their narrow valleys these Italians, so well born, 
learned, and refined, many of them of high rank in their for- 
saken land and Church. Among them was the celebrated 
Peter Verger, once a bishop, a papal legate, a reader of Luther's 
writings, but now a moderate Lutheran, co-working with fully 
twenty of his exiled countrymen in planting and serving 
Churches of the Swiss type. He often visited them from 
Tubingen, where he spent his last years (1553-65) in a pro- 
fessorship. When the Grisons were invaded by the doctrines 
of Socinus, Blandrata, Servetus, and the Anabaptists, the 
synod and the civil authorities expelled the teachers. This 
heroic little republic had its fine schools, its classical and Bib- 
lical literature, and its missionary Protestantism. 



NOTES. 

I. The Anabaptists (rebaptizers, generally by immersion) were of 
almost every sort, from the wildest fanatics to the later and more sober 
Christians, who came to be called Baptists. Of the first were the Munzer- 
ites and the Munsterites. At Munster, in Westphalia, Rottmann introduced 
Lutheranism. He rejected infant baptism and rebaptized adults. To 
strengthen himself against all other parties he gathered in Anabaptists from 
other quarters, and among them were John Brockelson, a tailor, of Ley den, 
and John Mathys, a baker, from Harlem. They attained power, and ex- 
pelled "all unbelievers," for such was "the will of God revealed through 
Mathys, the prophet." They seized the wealth of the city, destroyed art 
and books (save the Bible), and established communism. Brockelson prac- 
ticed polygamy, and announced himself as king of the whole earth. He 
sent out twenty-eight apostles to convert the world and twelve dukes to 
govern it in his name. The Roman Catholic bishop laid siege to Munster, 
and finally took it (1535), and cruelly put to death the universal king and 
his officers. The fanatics were scattered abroad to trouble other cities. 
Munster was restored to Romanism. 

The Mennonites form the second race of Anabaptists. They took their 
name from Menno Simonis of Friesland. He gave up his pastoral charge 
as a priest in 1536, labored to reform the Anabaptists in Holland with great 
success, and claimed to agree with the evangelical reformers in certain 
essential doctrines. He rejected infant baptism and baptized believers by 
pouring; also rejected the oath, military service, and salvation by faith 



NOTES TO CHAPTER XVII. 417 

alone. Feet-washing was made a rite of the Church. The morality and 
strict discipline of this sect secured its toleration. 

II. Special subjects of controversy in the Lutheran Church. 1. Syner- 
gism, or the co-working of man with God in spiritual life. Taught by Melanc- 
thon, as it had been by some of the Greek Fathers. Strongly opposed by 
Flacius Illyricus, the learned, intolerant leader of the Magdeburg Centuri- 
ators, and by the new University of Jena (1557). 

2. Original sin. Flacius represented it as the very substance or essence 
of man's nature, and not the corruption of his nature. He was charged 
with Manichean dualism, deposed, and banished with forty-seven adherents. 

3. Justification was confounded with sanctification by Osiander (1549). 
His son-in-law was executed as a heretic and disturber of the peace. Other 
followers were expelled from Prussia. 

4. Good works not meritorious, but still necessary to salvation. So 
taught George Major, professor at Wittenberg (1539-74), who was too free 
with his anathemas upon the Solifidians. 

5. Antinomianism, or the ignoring of good works, was preached by John 
Agricola (1527-62), who vexed Luther more than any pope did. 

6. The ubiquity of Christ's human nature, advocated by Brentz, who 
pushed consubstantiation to an extreme. 

7. Crypto-Calvinism, a term applied to the polity of the Philippists, or 
Melancthonians, who were specialized by their views of Synergism and 
the eucharist. In Saxony they quietly, if not unfairly, gained nearly all the 
posts under Elector Augustus (1553-86). Their leader was Caspar Peucer, 
son-in-law of Melancthon. The elector felt outwitted. They were imprisoned 
or banished in 1574. Peucer was in jail twelve years. This was not the 
end. (See Chapter XVIII, Section IX.) 

8. Predestination. John Marbach, at Strasburg (1545-81), did not 
oppose the predestinarian doctrine of Luther and Calvin so much as the 
a priori method and extreme statements of Jerome Zanchi, who had a strong 
array of theologians on his side. 

9. Universal Grace. Some Lutherans, following out certain hints of 
Melancthon, began to maintain that Christ died for all men alike and 
equally; and that all men who know the Gospel have grace sufficient to 
save them if they will spiritually co-operate with God. That is, the atone- 
ment and saving grace are not limited by any divine decree of election. 

III. To settle the controversies just named (Note II), various doctrinal 
articles were proposed. The main result was the Form of Concord. It was 
secured in 1576-7 by the arduous efforts of Jacob Andrea, theological pro- 
fessor at Tiibingen, aided by Selnecker and by the still more eminent 
Martin Chemnitz, the greatest of Melancthon's pupils. It was too polemic. 
It seemed to be the red flag of the high Lutheran party, and it has never 
been so generally accepted as the more catholic Augsburg Confession. In 
1580 all the Lutheran symbols were published in one volume entitled, The 
Book of Concord. This virtually completed the doctrinal formulas of the 
Lutheran Church. The Saxon Visitation Articles, 1592, were the local sec- 

V 



41 8 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

tarian and temporary creed of Dr. Calovius and his party, who gravely 
discussed whether Calvinists may be reckoned among Christians ! 

" If Lutheranism had not assumed a hostile and uncompromising atti- 
tude towards Zwinglianism, Calvinism, and the later theology of Melancthon, 
it would probably have prevailed throughout the German Empire, as the 
Reformed Creed prevailed in all the Protestant cantons of Switzerland. But 
the bitter eucharistic controversies and the triumph of rigid Lutheranism in 
the Formula of Concord over Melancthonianism, drove some of the fairest 
portions of Germany, especially the Palatinate and Brandenburg, into the 
Reformed Communion." (Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, i, 525.) 

"The Crypto-Calvinistic controversies were conducted with so much 
violence that they frustrated the scheme of the Philippists to effect an im- 
perceptible transition of the entire Lutheran Church to Calvinism ; but they 
could not prevent several national Lutheran Churches in Germany from 
adopting, or being compelled to adopt, the Reformed Confession." (See 
Chapter XVIII, Section IX.) (Kurtz, Lutheran, Church History, ii, 151.) 



ULRIC ZWINGLI. 419 



Chapter XVIII. 

THE SWISS REFORMATION, 

1506-1564. 

I. The Reform in German Switzerland. 

Seven weeks after Luther's birth, on the New-Year's day 
of 1484, Ulric Zwingli was born at Wildhaus, in the canton of 
St. Gall. His father was the chief man of the village, and the 
spokesman of a band of mountaineers who had thrown off the 
feudal yoke and sought more liberty for the republic. His 
mother reared him in the piety of the time. The son pursued 
his higher studies at Berne and Vienna. He refused to enter a 
Dominican convent, and valued humanism above all else until 
at Basle he was led from the classics to the Holy Scriptures. 
There he must have heard Dr. Thomas Wittenbach say, "The 
scholastic theology will be swept out of the Church and the 
doctrines of God's Word revived. Priestly absolution is a 
cheat. Christ alone paid the ransom for our souls." 

Zwingli is eminent for his love of liberty — personal, social, 
civil, and ecclesiastical. Compared with Luther he was thrown 
more directly into the affairs of common life, among villagers, 
herdsmen, and soldiers; he was never a monk; he had more 
classic culture and a warmer sympathy for the ancient pagan 
sages ; he dared to hope that the noblest heathen, whose virtues 
he overestimated, were among the elect of God;* he was the 
emancipator of a world of children from one of the saddest of 
old beliefs, by teaching that all dying infants are redeemed by 
Christ ; and he had less severe struggles on his way to the cross. 
We hear less of deep conviction of sin. He passed more quietly 
from Romish works to justifying faith. 

While he was a pastor for ten years, after 1506, in the nar- 

* He wrote: "The virtues of heathen sages and heroes are due to divine 
grace. By grace they were led to exercise faith in God. A Socrates was more 
pious and holy than all Dominicans and Franciscans." 



V 



420 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

row valley of Glaris, he sought to lead the people to higher 
morality and nobler patriotism. Marching as a field-preacher 
(15 1 5) with the army into Italy to defend the pope, he made 
researches in the libraries and churches of Milan, found an old 
liturgy, and had evidence that the mass of his time did not 
exist in the better days of Ambrose. Already had he studied 
the Greek Testament, visited Erasmus at Basle, and learned the 
self-interpreting power of the Bible. Now he preached with 
fresh vigor. Not yet boldly assailing the errors of the clergy 
and the Church, but saying, "If the people understand what is 
true they will soon discern what is false." He had not yet 
heard the name of Luther. In 15 17 he became preacher to the 
famous convent of Einsedeln, where a group of scholars met 
and qualified themselves for coming work. There crowds of 
pilgrims gathered to obtain mercy from a black image of the 
Virgin Mary. To them he declared, "Christ alone saves, and 
he saves every- where; not man, but God forgives sins; not 
works., but faith, justifies. " 

In 1 5 19 he became preacher in the Cathedral Church of 
Zurich, and from that time Zurich was the center and strong- 
hold of the reform in German Switzerland. His zeal, eloquence, 
practical mind, and his application of the Gospel to all the 
affairs of life gave him the power of a true bishop. Already 
he had roused such indignation against Samson, the traveling 
auctioneer of indulgences, that the gates of Zurich would not 
open for those sinful wares, and Pope Leo X recalled his agent. 
Zwingli's efforts had a threefold aim: to purify the morals of 
the citizens; to restrain the Swiss from mercenary service to 
foreign powers, and restore the spirit of independence in the 
Swiss confederation; and to interpret the Word of God not 
merely by collating a few texts on some point of doctrine, but 
by expounding entire books of Scripture in their obvious sense. 
He was a social, political, and religious reformer. He had not 
to fight Luther's battle with the pope. When priests, canons, 
bishop, and cardinal tried every means, except the effectual, 
to overthrow him, the senate was firm on his side. It soon 
ordered all the parish ministers in the canton to explain the 
New Testament as Zwingli was doing; and avoid all human 
inventions. Three years brought great changes. At Zurich 
Leo Juda was translating the Bible and preaching it. The 



RESTORATION OF PRESBYTERY. 42 1 

most intense opposition came from "the five forest cantons"* 
in the very heart of German Switzerland. Elsewhere the peo- 
ple gladly heard the Word. 

Thus far the movement was under the control of the state, 
which could not rightly perform spiritual work. The Word 
and Spirit of God had won marvelous triumphs. But a re- 
formed polity of Church government was lacking. The power 
of the mass and of images had not been entirely broken, nor 
could it be by the civil authority. The Church must be led 
out of priestly bondage, brought to the front, reorganized, 
unified, installed in her office, duties, and privileges ; her char- 
acter restored, her rights resumed, her authority pronounced, 
her worship purified, her discipline revived, and her mission 
asserted. All this would come. By invitation of the senate, 
representatives of the cantons of Zurich, St. Gall, and Schaff- 
hausen met in the town hall of Zurich, October 26, 1523 — a 
historic day in the restoration of ancient presbytery, f The 
other cantons refused to send delegates. Not a bishop would 
herd with "that heretic Zwingli and his fellows." About one 
thousand people were in the hall. The Bible was on the table. 
Zwingli opened the discussion with a startling proposition. He 
claimed that the true Church is the community of all who be- 
lieve in Christ and obey his Word, and not the clergy alone ; 
that the reforming Church of these cantons might resume the 
rights which the New Testament grants to the Church uni- 
versal; I that it was represented by the present assembly, 
and that these representatives had the right to decide upon 
matters of faith, worship, and discipline. He maintained his 
ground by Scripture, and finally carried the day against images 
and the mass, which were the special subjects of dispute. 

"This," says D'Aubigne, "is the beginning of the Presby- 
terian system in the age of the Reformation." No plan of 
Church government was yet brought forward by the most thor- 
ough reformers anywhere else, nor was the name Protestant 



* Uri, Schwytz, Unterwalden, Zug, and Lucerne. They were joined by 
Friburg. 

t Fifteen years before the Lutherans had their first Consistory at Wittenberg. 

J The existing Church was not dissolved nor abandoned; it had its con- 
tinuity in the reformed polity. See last point in the note at the end of 
Chapter XVI. 



422 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

yet known. But the Church of Zurich, long quite free towards 
her bishop at Constance, was now emancipated. The parity 
of the clergy, the equal voice of ministers and laymen in a 
representative assembly, the common priesthood of believers, 
and their right to restore what they regarded as the Scriptural 
constitution of the Church, were there assumed. The majority 
of the priests there voted, and thenceforth acted as presbyters, 
who had won back their rights and were ready for their duties. 
They went back to their parishes, with stronger faith and zeal, 
to wage the spiritual battle before them. The Reformed min- 
isters of Zurich formed a consistory for the government of the 
Church.* 

And still the mass and images were in hot controversy. 
The Romanists clung to them as essential. Moderate senators 
thought they might be used as staffs for the weak and lame. 
The Anabaptists stormed against them with a much more 
worthy zeal than they evinced towards sound faith and good 
order. The Reform was in peril. Amid all parties stood 
Zwingli, appealing to the Word of God. It alone could 
save the liberated Church from Romanism, fanaticism, and 
compromising measures. What does it sanction ? Before this 
searching question the images and relics fell ; even a painted 
window might be shattered, the frescoes erased from a wall, the 
organ hushed, the bells no longer rung, and every mere orna- 
ment removed ; mediaeval ceremonies passed out of the Re- 
formed Church of Zurich, and ritualism was driven into a 
silence it had not known for a thousand years. Later Puritan- 
ism would not demand more plainness in worship, nor secure 
more spiritual fervor. Zwingli must have his wedding, f and 
the baptism of his infant children, free from all ritualistic dis- 
play. But he sang in his bliss at home, and restored to 
the Church the public service of song. At Easter, 1525, the 
Lord's Supper, with bread and wine, in the simplest manner, 
at a table instead of an altar, free from every sign of a mass, 
was first celebrated in Zurich, if not first in all Europe since 
the great degeneracy. That city was the first to become rad- 

*What is now called a Session (a body sitting) was called by the Zurichers a 
Still-stand, for the members stood after a service in church, to hear any matter 
that might come before them. 

tin 1522, he married the widow Anna Reinhard. 



BERNE REFORMED. 423 

ically Protestant. It led the way in dissolving the monasteries 
and devoting their revenues to schools, hospitals, and alms- 
houses. It soon had its reformed press, university, and litera- 
ture. Zwingli was not only chief pastor and adviser of the 
senate, but professor of theology. 

Other Swiss cities followed the example of Zurich, although 
some of their triumphs were not so peaceful. The state used 
its power to effect the revolution. Berne seemed fixed in the 
old Roman way, unwilling to depart from the routine of her 
fathers. But the preaching of Haller, Meyer, and Kolb had its 
attraction, and drew hundreds to Christ. The elections of 
1527 put enough reformers into the Great Council to remove 
from the government the chief partisans of Romanism. But 
these ardent papists were not banished from the canton, nor 
were many of the raving Anabaptists. Nobly did Haller say, 
"The magistrates wish to expel them, but it is our duty to 
drive out their errors, and not their persons. Let our only 
weapon be the sword of the Spirit."* At the time of a dis- 
putation (1528), in which Zwingli, CEcolampadius, William 
Farel, and Martin Bucer were invited leaders, the priests were 
left free to say mass on the day of St. Vincent, the patron of 
the city. The bells rang, but no worshipers entered the cathe- 
dral. No priest said mass, for there were none to hear it! 
At vespers the organist found himself quite alone. After he 
left in sadness, certain radicals broke in and shivered the organ 
to pieces. Arguments had convinced "my Lords of Berne." 
The two councils abolished the mass and ordered the removal 
of images and decorations from the churches. But the citizens 

*The routed disciples of Stork and Munzer seemed bent upon turning Zu- 
rich into another Miihlhausen. They were expelled. They made little Zollikon 
their headquarters. Some of their crimes were atrocious. "They spread them- 
selves over all Switzerland, preaching resistance to all authority, and the right 
of the saints — that is, of the rebaptized — to take and use whatever they found 
needful. They sowed the seeds of discontent and idleness among the laboring 
classes; they intrigued to obtain control of the cities by aid of these malcon- 
tents, and all but succeeded at Basle. At last the magistracies of the republic 
united in the forcible suppression of the sect ; many were burned alive, others 
were drowned in the rivers. Protestant and Catholic cantons vied with each 
other in measures of success/ul violence ; but it was against sectaries, whose suc- 
cess would have been a cause of far greater evils than any that were inflicted on 
them. To this day the name of Anabaptist is an abomination to the ordi- 
nary Swiss." 



424 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

were more iconoclastic ; they utterly destroyed twenty-five 
altars and uncounted idols. Not a human being was injured ; 
the children sang the victory in the streets. The reorganization 
of the Church was soon effected. Yet Berne did not make so 
complete a riddance of old customs as Zurich had done. Her 
retention of baptismal fonts and certain festivals had a marked 
effect at Geneva. 

On his way home Zwingli must ride through papal cantons, 
in which his life was not safe. He found the gates of Brem- 
garten, in Aargau, closed against him. But he had the com- 
pany of stout bailiffs and two hundred armed men, who Avere 
drawn up in striking array, lances forward, and the gates were 
opened. The troop kindly saluted the vast crowd in the streets, 
and passed on to Zurich. What does the married priest, Dean 
Bullinger, say to all this? Ten years ago he bravely shut out 
the peddler of indulgences, and his son Henry, who had sung 
for bread while at a Swiss school, went off to Cologne to study 
logic and philosophy. The lad of fifteen was led through 
heavy tomes of the schoolmen to the ancient Fathers*, espe- 
cially Jerome and Augustine. He gave nights and days to the 
study of the New Testament. Luther's flying tracts helped to 
destroy his reverence for the pope. In 1522 he was at home 
eagerly mining truths in the Bible, and lingering over the 
"Common Places" of Melancthon. He went twelve miles to 
see Zwingli, and had his growing faith confirmed. Then he 
studied with Abbot Joner, was ordained by the synod, and was 
greatly blessed in preaching at Cappel. 

One day, in 1529, the good dean publicly said to his flock, 
"For twenty-three years I have taught you what I supposed to 
be the truth. I was blind, and was leading you on in darkness. 
Now I see ; may God pardon my error. By his help I shall 
henceforth show you the right way of salvation, and try to lead 
you by the hand to Jesus Christ." There was no small stir in 
the audience. The chief magistrate left the church in flaming 
wrath, and sought the aid of the papal cantons to quench the 
heresy. Bremgarten was full of commotions. But the earnest 
old dean had strong supporters. They were defended by Zu- 
rich and "my Lords of Berne." They met in convention, 
had the majority of votes, abolished the mass, images, and all 
papal machinery, and called two pastors, Henry Bullinger and 



THE WORK AT BASLE. 425 

his young friend, Gervas Schuler, who had come up from 
Strasburg to aid him at Cappel. "So mightily grew the 
Word and prevailed." 

Basle was the city of learning and of printing, when many 
printers were scholars and critical editors. There Erasmus was 
the prince of a literary republic. In editing the Greek Testa- 
ment (15 16) he had the help of John Hausschein, or CEcolam- 
padius, a Franconian, then thirty-four years of age. Educa- 
ted at Heidelberg and other universities, wandering here and 
there, now preaching Christ to his countrymen at his native 
Winsperg, then entering a monastery near Augsburg, and soon 
escaping from it, he finally settled again at Basle, to be re- 
nowned as the Melancthon of the Swiss Reformation. He 
preached to crowds in St. Martin's church, and his associates 
rejoiced at his. successes. Without their knowledge, in 1528, 
a band of citizens entered the church, hurled down the images, 
and went to prison for it. The majority of the people rose, 
and compelled the Great Council to release them, and grant the 
reformed the use of several churches, which were soon cleared 
of all the signs of popery. The guilds demanded the entire 
abolition of "idolatry." The Romanists took up arms; the 
reformed grasped weapons of defense ; and civil war was threat- 
ening. But the Great Council ordered a convention. The 
papal minority were unwilling to submit the disputes to a pop- 
ular vote, and the reformed party made a sudden attack upon 
altars and images. Great piles of them were burnt in the 
streets. The leaders did not encourage such violence. 

The chief papists fled. Erasmus hurried away to Friburg, 
for he sought a reform that would not involve separation from 
the Roman Church. He wrote thus : The reformed party 
"broke into no house, nor did they attack any person, though 
the chief magistrate, my next-door neighbor, ... was 
obliged to fly by night in a boat, and would have been killed 
had he not done so. Many others also fled through fear, who, 
however, were recalled by the council, if they wished to enjoy 
their rights as citizens, but all who favored the old religion were 
removed from the council, so as to put an end to disunion 
there. . . . Not a statue was left either in the churches, or 
the vestibules, or the porches, or the monasteries. The frescoes 
were coated over with lime; whatever would burn was thrown 



426 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

into the fire, and the rest pounded into fragments. . . . Be- 
fore long the mass was totally abolished, so that it was forbid- 
den to celebrate it in one's own house, or to attend it in the 
neighboring villages. . . . CEcolampadius urged me not 
to leave Basle. I said ' I will stop at Friburg for some months, 
and thence go whithersoever Providence shall send me. ' So we 
shook hands and parted." Erasmus outlived his friend, saw his 
fine edition of Augustine in print, visited Basle, where he died 
in 1536 — died, after all, in a Protestant city, and as the monks 
in their jargon said he would die, sine lux, sine crux* — and the 
grateful universities saw his body laid to rest in the cathedral. 

Little Wesen abolished the mass, and said, "We must obey 
God in religion ; ye rulers of Schwytz may command us in civil 
affairs." An officer was sent over to them. He saw the lads 
of the town carry the images from the church to a place where 
several roads met, and there they said to the statues, "This 
way leads to Schwytz, that to Glaris; this to Zurich, that to 
Coire ; choose your road and go in peace ; but move along 
speedily, or we will burn you." These supposed "helps to 
salvation" could not save themselves. They were the only 
martyrs of Wesen, so long as the reformed had control. The 
good work extended to the Grisons. Outside of the five for- 
est cantons, it bade fair to win majorities in the whole confed- 
eration. The common method of the Swiss reformers was to 
ask a deliberate hearing, a free vote of the citizens, an accept- 
ance of the Bible as the rule of faith and worship wherever they 
had the majority, and the protection of the civil authorities. 
Their general aim was to be tolerant. 

The controversy upon the Eucharist grew more intense, and 
Zwingli came to be regarded as the leading opponent of Luther. 
In 1529 Philip of Hesse invited the reformers to meet in Mar- 
burg, and settle the question. The great public debate lasted 
three days. Luther had written with chalk upon the velvet 
cover of the table, "This is my body," and from the literal 
sense of those words nothing could move him. He sought the 
explanation in what has been called the doctrine of consub- 
stantiation. Zwingli quoted such phrases as "That rock was 
Christ," "I am the vine," "The lamb is the passover," argu- 

* Without light, without the crucifix, and priestly ceremonies. The monks 
were tenacious of bad Latin. 



MARBURG CONFERENCE— FIVE FOREST CANTONS. 427 

ing that "this represents my body." It was all in vain. Lu- 
ther's friend's were pained at his obstinacy. They urged him 
to come to some agreement. "There is only one way," said' 
Luther; "let our adversaries believe as we do." The Swiss 
replied that they could not. "Well then," he rejoined, "I 
abandon you to God's judgment, and pray that he may give 
you light." The hope of union seemed utterly lost when 
Luther rudely declined to acknowledge the Swiss party as 
brethren in the faith, and even to take the proffered hand of 
Zwingli, who burst into tears. But anger usually has its reac- 
tion. High tempers cooled in the breath of such men as 
Melancthon and CEcolampadius. Luther saw that "he was 
wiping his nose too roughly," stepped forward and offered his 
hand in peace and charity. It was shaken heartily. There 
was a general hand-shaking in the room. Articles of a com- 
mon faith must be signed. Luther must draw them up. He 
had little hope, but based them on the Apostles' Creed. The 
Swiss eagerly indorsed them, and all thus agreed, with solemn 
seal, ( ' that the spiritual reception of this body and blood is 
especially necessary to every Christian." But this did not set- 
tle the controversy. 

The movements of Zwingli were those of an honorable 
strategist. He now attempted to unite the Protestant can- 
tons in a religious league, and ally them with the evangelical 
states of Germany. Philip of Hesse exulted in the scheme of 
the Reformed Defensive Alliance, which was born at Zurich. 
Within the circle of the reformed cantons lay the Five Forest 
Cantons, all intensely papal. Their officials had expelled Os- 
wald Myconius, fined, imprisoned, tortured, and even slain 
other teachers and believers. Probably in the first war the 
reformed party might have conquered them, if they had not 
sought and obtained the first Peace of Cappel (1529), by which 
all parties were to be tolerant. The Five Cantons violated the 
treaty (153 1), persecuted the Zwinglians, and renewed their 
alliance with Austria, willing to be slaves to an old foreign ty- 
rant rather than be free and kind to their neighbors. Ill affairs 
grew to the worst when, in 1 53 1, the papal Swiss marched for 
Zurich, and Zwingli went with the men of his flock, as custom 
required and the defense of the Protestant stronghold seemed 
to demand. As a chaplain, adviser, and consoler, rather than 



428 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

a warrior, he fell at a post of danger, on the field of Cappel. 
Twenty-five preachers of the reform there perished. Luther 
was one of the strong men who wept over their death. The 
war grew more bitter until " the treaty of Christian citizenship " 
so ended it that both parties agreed to tolerate each other. 
But political faith was often broken. The papists won back 
many of the reformed Churches, and expelled their members. 
They made a grand pilgrimage to Einsedeln, restored the image 
of Mary, and again made that once reformed convent the cen- 
ter of papal intrigue and power. Basle, Berne, and Zurich 
held fast to Protestantism. Each offered its highest position to 
the rising man, Henry Bullinger, whose name became eminent 
in his own republic and in England, for his rich stores of learn- 
ing, his gentleness, firmness, and judgment, untiring zeal, and 
love of union upon evangelical principles. He entered upon a 
quiet, peaceable, but active life of duty in pulpit and with pen, 
when he became the chief pastor and the professor of theology 
at Zurich, where he gladly saw the four folios of Zwingli's works 
published to the world. 

Through a new period — that of confessions and alliance — 
Bullinger was the leader of the Reformed Church in German 
Switzerland. This type of doctrine and polity had extended 
down the Rhine to Strasburg. Formulas of belief had been 
drawn up, but the Confession of Augsburg was the most cur- 
rent, and union with the Lutherans was generally desired. In 
1535 Bullinger was among the theologians who drafted the First 
Helvetic Confession, the most important one for the reformed 
Churches before the public appearance of Calvin. It failed to 
secure an alliance with the Lutherans, but it was a basis for 
the union of its adherents with the presbyteries of French 
Switzerland. 

II. The Training of Reformers in France. 

If the semi-Protestant reform in France (1512-55) had been 
sanctioned by King Francis I and the chief bishops, it might 
have been similar to the English movement under Henry VIII, 
and resulted in a new National Church, with Protestant episco- 
pacy. It fairly tested the willingness of the Roman Church to 
promote reform. It was an immense preparation for the suc- 
cess of reformed theology and presbytery at Geneva. To 



TRAINING OF REFORMERS IN FRANCE. 429 

French exiles that city became what Midian was to Moses, and, 
still remembering the persecuted brethren in their native land, 
they sent to them deliverers, who should proclaim a spiritual 
redemption, and found a glorious Protestant Church in their 
father-land. 

The first sparks of this reform fell into the University of 
Paris. There Jacques Le Fevre, as early as 15 12, lectured on 
Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and set forth the way of justifi- 
cation by faith in Christ. Among the students who were drawn 
most closely to him was William Farel, born in 1489, near Gap 
in Dauphiny, and steeped in all the errors of his village priest. 
But he soon learned to think for himself, and he never lacked 
courage to speak what he believed. A circle of men studied 
the Bible ; the Sorbonne, or theological faculty, raised the cry 
of heresy, and they were compelled to flee. Their best human 
defender w r as Bishop Briconnet, who had seen the abyss of im- 
morality at Rome, and resolved to reform his diocese of Meaux. 
Being invited thither, Le Fevre, Farel, and other earnest spirits, 
began their work, and for three years (1519-23) they made a 
more quiet and marked progress than Luther knew in that 
very time. More than a hundred priests and curates were 
dismissed for ignorance and selfishness. A theological school 
was attempted. The New Testament was translated and widely 
circulated. The Gospel went into parishes, factories, and fields. 
The moral change was wonderful. Rude smiths and weavers 
refined their manners, led purer lives, and sang the songs of joy 
and hope. Meaux might have become the French Wittenberg, 
if the Sorbonnists had not borne down upon it with all their 
persecuting forces. The crusade reduced the bishop, quashed 
the press, drove out the laborers, filled dungeons, made noble 
martyrs, burnt writings of Luther and Erasmus, posted a line 
of guards all along the Rhine border, and soon extended over 
nearly all the eastern provinces, wherever a Bible-reader or a 
missionary caused alarm among prelates and theologians. Out 
of this tempest of wrath Farel thrice escaped, and at Basle 
secured the printing of thousands of New Testaments, which 
were scattered through France. He preached to exiles in 
Strasburg, his loud voice rang through Alsace, and he turned 
his eye to Switzerland. 

The king's sister, Margaret, afterwards Queen of Navarre, 



430 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

adopted the reform, and made Lyons a center of colportage 
and evangelization. Missionaries were active until banished or 
slain. Francis allowed her ministers to preach at his court, 
punished the monks who ridiculed her, and forced the Sorbonne 
to retract its censure of one of her little books. He invited 
Melancthon to take a chair in the University of Paris. For 
some time he questioned which of the three rival systems to 
favor most — Romanism, the Renaissance, or the Reformation.* 
He seems to have been inflamed by the placards posted on his 
own door. These anonymous, unmanly theses and challenges 
did not bring public discussions, but caused suspicion and per- 
secution. When Francis yielded up the Pragmatic Sanction, 
the Gallican liberties were gone, and the pope was master. 
After his defeat at Pavia, 1525, and his release from captivity 
in Spain, he treated the reformers as enemies of both crown 
and Church. His son Henry married Catherine de Medici, a 
niece of the pope, and he declared for "one king, one law, 
one faith." Thenceforth he was Rome's favorite son. To his 
change of policy may, perhaps, be traced the ages of religious 
war and woe, perfidy and revolution, which make the history 
of France wearisome with massacres. 

In that stormy land and time John Calvin began his work 
as a reformer. Born in 1509, at Noyon in Picardy ; led by his 
mother to a high reverence for God ; kept in a good social 
position by his father, who was a secretary of the diocese ; 
educated with the sons of a nobleman in the best culture the 
town could afford, and following them to Paris, he entered the 
university in his fourteenth year, and held a distant curacy, 
whose small benefice supported him. His reserve, temperance, 
soberness, rebukes of folly and vice, affection for his teachers 
and a few choice classmates, and intense devotion to study, 
won him great respect. His logical mind readily evinced its 
independence. In 1527 he seems to have been led by his kins- 
man, Robert Olivetan, to self-knowledge, conviction of sin, 
spiritual need, conversion, f and the consecration of himself to 



* Loyola, Rabelais, and Calvin, their coming representatives, were then 
young students in Paris. 

tOf his conversion, or the consciousness of it, he said: "On a sudden the 
full knowledge of the truth, like a bright light, disclosed to me the abyss of 
errors in which I was weltering. A horror seized on my soul when I became 



CALVIN IN POITOU. 43 1 

the Redeemer in whom he trusted. Thenceforth the Divine 
Word became his chief study. 

It may have been this spiritual change, and the paternal 
horror of heresy, that brought an order from his ambitious fa- 
ther for him to study law. This he pursued at Orleans and 
Bourges; but still theology engaged his mind. Melchior Wol- 
mar, a Swabian, taught him Greek, and confirmed him in the 
doctrines of the Reformation. He met with groups of inquirers, 
and went out preaching in the villages. His services were in 
demand. "I began to seek some hiding-place," he wrote; 
"but every retreat was to me a public school, so many flocked 
to me." The death of his father left him more free. He re- 
turned to Paris, published Seneca on Clemency, held meetings 
by night in private houses, and nurtured the faith of many 
who would soon be dragged to the stake and there win con- 
verts. He helped Nicholas Cop, the newly elected rector of 
the university, prepare his inaugural address, full of new ideas 
which heated the Sorbonnic wrath, and led parliament to in- 
quire for heresy. The rector barely escaped by flight. When 
search was made for Calvin, and officers were parleying at the 
doors, he is said to have been let down from a college window 
and hurried to a farm-house. Disguised as a vine -dresser, he 
made his way to Angouleme. He was there in the library of 
his fellow-student, the young canon, Louis Du Tillet; and if he 
did not "hammer out the Institutes in that smithy," he wrote 
sermons for the neighboring priests to read in the churches, 
for they were charmed with "the little Greek." He was at 
Poitiers ; and, meeting some of his trusted friends in a cave, 
he celebrated the Lord's Supper. He kindled the faith of 
young men, one an eloquent lawyer, who took the Gospel 
itself as their commission, and preached the glad tidings to thou- 
sands in the old lands of the slain Albigenses. His work in 
South-western France alone would entitle him to a high place 
among missionaries and organizers. In Navarre he visited the 
aged Le Fevre, sheltered there by Queen Margaret, who was 
spiritually a nursing- mother to a race of future Huguenots. 



conscious of my wretchedness and the more terrible misery that was before me. 
And what was left, O Lord, for me but, with tears and prayers, to forsake the 
old ways which thou hast condemned, and to flee into thy path?" His experi- 
ence was like that of Luther; but he more clearly and speedily saw the remedy. 



432 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Two ages met, when the old man, representing the failing 
reform of the Roman Church, gave his blessing and prophecy 
to the young reformer, who would yet shake France with the 
tread of Calvinists, and send into it a theology which would 
break the force of the Sorbonne. 

"I am naturally diffident and retiring," said Calvin; and 
yet he had the courage to appear .again in Paris (1534). He 
preached in the houses of his friends. Might he not appease 
the better Romanists by joining with them against a common 
foe? The Anabaptists were busily winning disciples by their 
wild doctrines. He sent out a valuable little book against their 
error, that the soul sleeps from death to the resurrection. He 
agreed to meet Servetus, who professed an eagerness to discuss 
with him the doctrine of the Trinity ; he went to the place, but 
Servetus did not come. He resigned his curacy in Picardy, 
where he had sometimes preached. No longer safe in France, 
he rode out of it to Strasburg, where he first met with Protest- 
ant reformers. Literary Basle attracted him. There he pub- 
lished the Institutes, in 1535, under the name of Alcuin. It 
was a little book,* containing the famous preface, or appeal 
to Francis I, who sought the alliance of the German princes, 
and excused his unrelenting severities on the French reformers 
by saying that he had merely put to death a few seditious 
Anabaptists ! Calvin's entire book was a defense of his perse- 
cuted brethren, an appeal for their liberty, a plea for their 
shelter among foreign nations, an exhibition of their faith. In 
its enlarged form it became a text-book in universities, even in 
England. In France it had a special mission, twenty years 
before the reform there was organized. ' ' Entering the schools, 
the castles of the gentry, the houses of the burghers, even the 
workshops of the people, the Institutes became the most pow- 
erful of preachers. Round this book the [Calvinistic] reformers 



* Long afterwards he wrote : " I did not then produce the large work which 
is now before the public, but a mere sketch of the design. So far was I from 
seeking fame by it that when I left Basle its authorship was not known. I still 
intended to keep it a secret." In this work "his eloquence is logic set on fire 
by intense conviction," says Dr. Schaff. He has been called "the rationalist 
of his age," in the sense of employing reason, not as the sole judge, but as the 
investigator and advocate of revealed truth. Any reader of his Institutes and 
commentaries may see that he respected the greater Fathers and councils, with- 
out subservience to their authority. 



THE DUCHESS RENEE. 433 

arrayed themselves as round a standard. They found in it 
every thing — doctrine, discipline, Church organization; and the 
apologist of the martyrs became the legislator of their children." 
Yet its strength was the Bible, which they loved all the more. 
It furnished the new base-line from which theological systems 
have been measured. 

When this volume had been started upon its wide and end- 
less travels Calvin took the road to Italy, hoping there to study 
or to advance the reform which had made a fair beginning. 
He met French exiles at Ferrara, about the court of the 
Duchess Renee, who would have been heir to the throne of 
France if she had been the son, rather than the daughter, of 
Louis XII — the king who had fought the Waldenses, and yet 
said, ''They are better Christians than we are." She was 
proud of her father's medal stamped with "I will destroy 
Babylon." Her weak husband sought to crush the reformative 
spirit that rose in the Italian cities. The Inquisition was busy 
in its horrible work, and Calvin slipped away. It seems that 
hidden Aosta, the birthplace of famous Anselm (1033), whom 
he resembled not a little, drove him from its Alpine retreat. 
But he had confirmed the faith and raised the hopes of the 
exiles at Ferrara. Most of them went back to France to pre- 
pare the way for his doctrines. Clement Marot, an erratic 
poet, did his best thing when he put into French verse about 
forty of David's Psalms, and set all France to singing them, in 
court, castle, hamlet, and vineyard. Only the Sorbonne could 
yet detect heresy in them, and their voice was mighty for the 
coming restoration of the Church. They were the basis of the 
reformed psalmody which rang through all Western Europe, 
and still rings even in America. And the good duchess would 
come, as a widow to her native land, and be the helper of 
Calvin and the Huguenots. 

It seems that Calvin visited Noyon for the last time, sold his 
little property, took with him his sister and brother Anthony, 
and departed for Switzerland, "not knowing the things that 
should befall him there." With a warm heart to his persecuted 
brethren, he said, "I am driven from the land of my birth. 
Every step toward its boundaries costs me tears. Perhaps 
Truth is not allowed to dwell in France; let her lot be mine." 

Thus, in 1535, the French reformation was in repression. 

28 



434 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Its leaders were banished. It had no organization. "It was 
a quiet, hidden movement in the souls of men thirsting for 
religious truth, for peace of conscience, for purity of heart and 
life. They sought each other out, and met to help each other 
on. But it was in small bands, in closets with closed doors, 
in the murky lanes of the city, in the lonely hut of the way- 
side, in the gorge of the mountain, in the heart of the forest, 
that they met to study the Scriptures, to praise and to pray. 
They did so at the peril of their lives, and the greatness of 
the peril guarded the purity of the motive." They needed two 
forces; a ministry to preach and organize, and a nobility to 
support and defend the work. Calvin would send the one ; 
Coligny represent the other. But they must wait twenty years. 

III. The Reform in French Switzerland. 

The kinship of language would bring exiles of France into 
French Switzerland. They were needed. Before the year 1526 
the cantons — Vaud, Neuchatel, and Geneva — sought no higher 
reform than republicanism. There were cautious readers of 
the Bible, but no native preacher rose up to declare that Christ 
alone saves, and faith alone justifies. No one proclaimed that 
the day was breaking, until the loud voice of a foreigner rang 
from the first Alp which was struck by the Sun of righteous- 
ness. He was the unresting William Farel. He had tried to 
gain a hearing at Neuchatel, but the priests routed him. It 
was his fourth defeat ; * yet this " Bayard of the battles of God " 
went to Berne to enlist in a new campaign. He could not 
preach in German, and "my lords of Berne" engaged him as 
a missionary for their seigniory of Aigle (yElen), which touched 
on the south-west corner of their own canton. It was French in 
language, papal in religion. The providence was remarkable. 
The little town of Aigle was the door of hope for the Gospel 
in all the Swiss Romande. Like the waters of its Alp, the 
forces of this hero would reach Geneva. 

In this remote village a Master Ursinusf quietly opened a 



* He had been driven from Meaux, Dauphiny, and Montbelliard. CEcolam- 
padiaus and Zwingli advised him to avoid all rash exploits. Erasmus had no 
patience with him. 

t Farel took this name probably from the bear on the shield of Berne, 
where tame bears were long kept at the public expense. 



WILLIAM FAREL— ALPINE CHURCHES. 435 

school (1526), drew the children, and then the wondering adults; 
explained their creed and the Lord's Prayer as the curate had 
never done ; led them to the New Testament, and asked them to 
take, read, believe it, and live by it. Thus he reared a band 
of faithful souls. When priests and bailiffs threatened him he 
was ready for discussion — ready for any thing - except surren- 
der and flight — and he quoted the authority of "my lords of 
Berne." He went to other towns: "the heretic" was forbid- 
den to teach, and then the Bernese Senate had posted, on the 
church doors of the four parishes, the decree that "all the 
officers of state must allow the very learned William Farel to 
preach publicly the doctrines of Christ." Crowds met and 
shouted, "No more submission to Berne! Down with Farel!" 
But the vote was taken. Aigle, Bex, and Ollon declared for 
the reform. These little Churches were the first in the ranks 
of strictly 1 French Protestantism. 

Farel extended his labors to other districts where Berne had 
a protective authority. Morat was taken and made his head- 
quarters. With a daring often intrusive, a zeal not always 
courteous, and a rough poetry in his utterances, he traversed 
the whole country. He was called "the Luther," and dreaded 
as "the scourge of priests," whose rights he was not careful to 
respect. His methods would not all be approved in a modern 
overseer of missions. To mount the pulpit while a priest was 
at mass, or interrupt the sermon of another by questions, and 
refute him on the spot, seemed to him justifiable. It was not 
unusual for him to stand amid hisses, shrieks, and flying mis- 
siles, speaking right on as if they were nothing, winning silence 
by his self-command, and then carry the majority by persuasion, 
or by a thunder-storm of eloquence. The reform was voted 
into favor, the worship purified, and the church reorganized. 
Some of his virulent foes became his zealous helpers in the 
ministry. Yet he was not always successful. Peril increased 
his audacity. Here he was dragged out of a captured pulpit 
and beaten ; there he was almost killed by furious women ; the 
wall of a cathedral long bore stains of his blood. At Granson 
he barely escaped assassins. Venturing into papal Lucerne he 
was flung into prison. It was no rare event for him to return 
to Morat, bruised, bleeding, and apparently half-dead. "Do 
not expose yourself to needless danger," was his last word from 



436 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Zwingli, who left a widow to read the prompt reply of a loving 
heart, "My life is in less peril than your own." Farel's great 
motive was a love for the truth, for his Master, and for human 
souls. Men learned the gentleness of the rough hero. When 
he wrote to his brethren under the cross in France, the lion was 
a lamb : they felt the sympathies of a great heart, and with 
him prayed and hoped for brighter days. 

When he was nearly killed at Orbe, success was won by his 
influence upon Peter Viret (1511-71), who had studied at Paris, 
adopted the views of Le Fevre, escaped the storm of Sorbonnic 
fury and retired to his native town, waiting for the skies to 
clear. He became the greatest native preacher among the 
French Swiss ; amiable, wise, devout, eloquent ; the reformer 
of Orbe, Payerne, and Lausanne, a popular writer, and at last 
the gatherer of vast crowds in Southern France. 

Already Farel had gained Neuchatel, where the priest was 
his friend and a rock his first pulpit. He won the hospital. 
One Sunday he was there to preach, when the people urged 
him into the cathedral, "the Church of our Lady," which the 
canons in vain defended. He preached ; the citizens shouted 
for the reform, and cleansed the temple of all papal apparatus. 
In memory of that grand day a cathedral pillar bore this in- 
scription, "On October 23, 1530, idolatry was overthrown and 
removed from this church by the citizens." 

Neuchatel was the first center of a presbyterial organization 
in French Switzerland. Each reformed city, or town, had its 
consistory quite like that of Zurich. Next to Viret, the more 
active ministers were exiles, chiefly from Dauphiny.* The 
Synod controlled all the ministers, and ordained others. It 
supervised and judged all the spiritual affairs of the Churches. 
In 1537 it divided the country into twelve Classes, or Presby- 
teries, over which it was the "Assemblee Generale." The 
system needed the revising hand of John Calvin, who had 
recently begun his work at the new center of organization 
and unity. 



* Farel had attracted thither his Dauphinese countrymen Christopher Fabri, 
Saunier, Froment, Marcourt, and Boyve (the last four named Anthony). The 
stronger Reformed churches (1535) were at Neuchatel, whose entire canton soon 
established the reform. Orbe, Thonon, Yverdun, Bienne, Valangin, Morat, Pay- 
erne, Granson, and Lausanne. In 1536 the Reformation was legalized in nearly 
the entire canton of Vaud, and soon the University of Lausanne was founded. 



GENEVAN HUGUENOTS. 437 

IV. The Revolution at Geneva. 

There were three movements in this old city, which had 
twelve thousand inhabitants, and was qualified by position and 
people for a vast influence. ''The first was the conquest of 
independence ; the second, the conquest of faith ; the third, the 
renovation and organization of the Church. Berthelier, Farel, 
and Calvin are the three heroes of these three epics." * 

There the bold monk, Baptiste, was sent to the stake, about 
1430, by his bishop and the Duke of Savoy. The tyrannies of 
Church and state were unified. If he had lived under the Bishop 
Champion (1493-8), he might have triumphed, and written to 
Savonarola, that the yoke of Savoy was broken, and that Ge- 
neva was as free as Florence. The later prince-bishops chose 
disorder, or, if Claude de Seyssel urged both secular and eccle- 
siastical liberty, the duke was suspected of poisoning him (15 13). 
The rich, idle, ignorant clergy seemed never to blush in their 
depravities. Then the people assumed their majesty, and de- 
manded reform. The syndics, or lay chiefs, tried to check the 
scandals of the priests. From that day the keen strife was 
between the laity and the clergy. Prior Bonivard, the Gene- 
van Erasmus, stung the priests with satires, criticised all par- 
ties, advocated freedom of conscience, and for six years he was 
"the prisoner of Chillon." Berthelier and Hugues secured an 
alliance with Berne and Friburg, and hence their party was 
called the oath-bound leaguers — Eidgenossen, Huguenots. They 
won their cause by revolution, not by reformation of morals. 
Berthelier, "the great despiser of death," was a martyr to the 
liberty, which was a powerful element in the Reformation. It 
was like the carbon which converts iron into steel. But it 
needed the fire of divine truth to spiritualize it, and to purge 
the dross from its own party. 

Many of these Huguenots were wild in their freedom ; tur- 
bulent, often despots over each other, and always unwilling to 
be restrained, even by their own laws, and by moral forces. 
They were driving out their bishop, but they wanted no new 
religion. They applauded Luther's free spirit and his revolt 
against the pope, but took little heed of his writings, and 

* D'Aubigne, who lays stress upon Geneva's central position between Italy, 
France, and Germany. 



438 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ignored his faith. A spiritual reformer would find them hard 
to manage. Yet there were Huguenots who gave welcome to 
the colporteurs of the New Testament (1524), and sat close 
about Robert Olivetan when he came to teach the sons of 
Jean Chautemps, and talk of the pardon of Jesus Christ. The 
placards — handbills, theses for discussion — came to Geneva, as 
almost every-where else. But they had no able defender. The 
priests grew angry. Bible-readers were hunted out, and even 
Olivetan must soon hide himself. 

In 1 53 1, Farel wrote to Zwingli. "I learn that Geneva has 
thoughts of accepting Jesus Christ. Fear of the Friburgers 
keeps them from receiving the Gospel." His eye was often 
turned to that city. The synod appointed him and Saunier to 
visit the Waldenses, some of whose ministers were visiting 
reformed countries. They went, imparted and received benefit, 
and returned with two important plans : one was for Olivetan 
to make a Waldensian version of the Bible ; the other, to begin 
their work in Geneva. 

V. The Reformation in Geneva. 

"A shabby little preacher, one Master William, of Dau- 
phiny, has just arrived in this city." Thus wrote the literary 
nun, Jeanne de Jussie, in 1532, and she was eager for the news 
from the hotel where Farel was, as she soon learned, ' ' begin- 
ning to speak secretly at his quarters, in a room, seeking to 
infect the people with heresy." He had there a little group 
of the more sober Huguenots. He proposed to them to make 
the Word of God their rule of life and of a higher liberty. 
They thought well of it, came again, talked of what they had 
heard, and soon found a great sensation in the town. Certain 
women ordered him away, threatened him, but for him this 
was no storm worth heeding. The council brought the two 
preachers into the town hall, heard their defense, and let them 
go with a caution not to disturb the peace with new doctrines. 
The clerical court handled them more roughly, and utterly re- 
fused them a license to preach. De Jussie says that about 
eighty of the lower priests gathered at the hotel, "all well 
armed, to defend the holy Catholic faith." The reformers 
owed their escape from the mob to the Huguenots. 

Farel went to Yvonand and said to its pastor, Anthony Fro- 



A PULPIT WON. 439 

ment, "Go to Geneva. Begin as I did at Aigle. Open a 
school." He went. He reached his highest point of varied 
effort, when he drew a crowd to a public square and there 
preached, until an armed force marched to seize him. He 
barely escaped to his pastorate. He had not been wise, and 
yet had not failed. Some members of influential families were 
among the believers. They met in a walled garden, outside 
the town, and there a layman administered the Lord's Supper 
for the first time in modern Geneva. 

The moral battle was now sharpened by the demands of the 
allied cantons. Bernese envoys conducted Farel, Viret, and Fro- 
ment into the city, and secured their liberty to preach at their 
lodgings in the house of Claude Bernard. On all sides there 
were great preachings and earnest inquiry. In a grand debate 
the monk Furbity was baffled. He would not recant, and went 
to prison for two years. The crisis came. "Restore the 
bishop, and banish Farel/' said Friburg, "or we shall retire 
from the league." Berne replied, "Maintain the Reformers 
if you want our alliance." The Genevan senators were per- 
plexed. Then the people rose to settle the question. They 
elected more Huguenot senators. Some of them led Farel 
into the Franciscan Church, and the Reformation had a pulpit. 
The papal Friburgers tore their seal from the alliance, and left 
Geneva to herself, to the league with Protestant Berne, to the 
reformers, and to freer progress. 

Geneva must now "render to faith the service which she 
had rendered to freedom." But the people needed deeper con- 
victions of truth. They were affected by the great debate which 
closed with the defeat of Peter Caroli, a doctor of the Sor- 
bonne, and his avowal of the reformed faith.* Monks, priests, 
citizens, nearly all Geneva, went over to the Protestants. 
Some of the minority removed to papal lands. Farel urged 
the senate to establish the Reformation by law. An edict of 
August 27, 1535, abolished the papal system, and enjoined 
worship according to the Word of God. After an attempt to 
poison the three preachers, they had been placed in the Fran- 
ciscan convent. Its prior, James Bernard, had renounced 
popery, and it was now turned into a public school under Sau- 

*He proved to be the Carlstadt of Geneva, wrought mischief, and went 
back to Romanism. 



440 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

nier. The nunnery of St. Claire was converted into a hospital. 
The nuns did not remain as Protestant Sisters of Charity. 
The revenues of the old Church were mainly applied to the 
support of the new clergy, the schools, and the poor. On 
Geneva's shield and coin the words, ' ' After darkness I hope for 
light," were changed to "After darkness light." 

To overthrow this new system, the exiled bishop and the 
Duke of Savoy made war on the city. When famine threat- 
ened the beleaguered Genevese, the King of France offered his 
protection if they would let him introduce a bishop over them. 
One of the syndics led his embassador to the walls where men, 
women, and children were in the snows throwing up defenses, 
ready to use their "weapons, rude and few," and asked, "Do 
they look like a people disposed to accept your offer?" That 
was enough for him. Bernese troops came, as a Swiss poet 
of the time says : 

" For hunger could not stop them, 
Nor mountains bar their way, 
Nor the sight of steel-clad foemen 
Could strike them with dismay. 
* * * * 

The Lord was on our side that day, 

In heart we felt his might ; 
And papal Savoy's champions 

Were scattered in the fight." 

Geneva had triumphed, and yet the cost of victory might 
be the loss of the reform. Farel toiled to keep the spiritual 
forces in unity. "He reigned, but over ruins out of which to 
rear a new edifice." He would have the people lay the founda- 
tions, for he knew the Genevese would adhere to nothing for 
which they did not vote. It was a grand scene — May 21, 
1536 — when the old Gothic cathedral was filled with citizens 
who took an oath to abide in the Reformation. Among them 
were not the lax thinkers, nor the Romanists who had been 
readmitted to the city. They might fling scoffs at the noble 
monument reared at one of the gates, as a witness to future 
ages that Geneva was grateful to God for "the restoration of 
the most holy religion of Christ." 

But public votes were not pious vows. The general morals 
were in wreck. The question was, How to purify society? 
How restrain men in their wild license? How create good 



CALVIN IN GENEVA. 441 

manners, customs, and habits? Our age, taught by past expe- 
rience, would answer, by increasing the spiritual agencies ; by 
teaching the Word of God to all the people ; by addressing 
every conscience ; by employing moral suasion. Farel and his 
associates used these means with all their might, but they tried 
other forces. They hoped that civil law would make custom. 
They found Geneva an ecclesiastical state ; they let it so re 
main. They did not release the Church from the civil power. 
If the government was theocratic, the senate ordained it, and 
that before Calvin's arrival. They seem to have revived certain 
laws of the bishops (1485-15 16) against games of chance, danc- 
ing, debauchery, drunkenness, and blasphemy. The Roman- 
ists had made the sumptuary laws ; Protestants would enforce 
them. The common amusements were vicious — many of them 
vile beyond any in our society. Laws were enacted against 
fairs, songs, lounging at taverns, masquerades, certain styles of 
dress, and ornaments. All persons must be at home by nine 
o'clock at night, strictly observe the Sabbath, and attend 
Church or leave the city. The effort was to furnish preaching 
to all German and Italian refugees in their own languages. 
All these affairs engaged the mind of Farel. He was often 
disheartened. Immorality and skepticism met him every-where, 
except in the hearts and homes and assemblies of those who 
scarcely needed such laws nor felt that they were rigorous. 
But they were relatively few ; the crowd were glorying in a 
liberty which did not make them spiritually free. 

The ministers seem to have had their consistory, but the 
secular councils had the direction of all affairs in the Church. 
A bond of unity, an expression of belief, an order of worship 
and discipline, were needed. Farel seems to have been at work 
upon a creed for the people — a simple confession of their 
faith — when a man came so unannounced, so uninvited, that 
the first thought was, "God has sent him." 

In July, 1536, Farel heard that the author of the Christian 
Institutes was in town for a night. He found him at the house 
of Viret, and presented the wants of the city. But said Cal- 
vin, who wished to study in Germany, "I can not bind myself 
to any one Church, I would be useful to all." Farel urged, 
argued, entreated, until his words broke forth like thunders 
rattling overhead. Long afterwards Calvin wrote, ' ' I was kept 



442 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

in Geneva, not properly by an express exhortation or request, 
but rather by the terrible threatenings of William Farel, which 
were as if God had seized me by his awful hand from heaven. 
So I was compelled to give up the plan of my journey, but yet 
without pledging myself to undertake any definite office, for I 
was conscious of my timidity and weakness." He would visit 
Basle, and then simply make trial of his abilities as a "pro- 
fessor of Sacred Literature," by which he meant an interpeter 
of God's Word, a teacher of Biblical theology, ethics, and 
home-going truth. 

The council acted rather warily towards "that French- 
man," as its records first mention Calvin. It voted him a 
slender allowance as lecturer or doctor in the cathedral, where 
large audiences gathered every day. It was pleased to learn 
that he was no fierce inconoclast nor stern innovator ; that he 
asked the people to believe only what was proved by Scripture, 
and that he showed himself a master in the writings of the 
apostles and the Fathers, in the great debate at Lausanne. It 
then elected him preacher in the cathedral, whose frescoes and 
stained windows remain to this day. He was now professor of 
theology and chief pastor in the city. From his acceptance 
of these offices it has been inferred that he was ordained — 
perhaps by the presbyters at Geneva. But we find no rec- 
ord of his ordination to the ministry either by Romanists or 
Protestants. 

In November Farel's Confession, which Calvin helped to 
frame, was ratified by the senate. It was practical rather than 
theological. It did not specify the "five points," afterwards 
so famous. It was not meant to be a manual for theologians, 
but a bond of union for the people, the outline of a popular 
belief, and a method of discipline. It aimed to instruct and 
confirm, to prune and purify, and make the Church to be "a 
body of true believers." One of the twenty-one articles de- 
clared "it to be expedient that all manifest idolaters, blas- 
phemers, murderers, thieves, seditious persons, strikers, and 
drunkards,* after they have been duly admonished if they 



* Such gross offenders had not been admitted into the Church by the reform- 
ers, but had grown up in it under the papal system. They had come over with 
it when it was voted to be reformed. The congregation was then identical with 
the church. 



THE CONTEST FOR DISCIPLINE. 443 

amend not, should be separated from the communion of the 
faithful, till their repentance has become apparent." But who 
should excommunicate offenders? Who would oppose further 
measures for the purification of the Church ? 

VI. The Contest for Discipline. 

There were soon four parties in Geneva. (1) The true Prot- 
estants in the several Churches, who stood firmly by their 
pastors. (2) Romanists, who had no public worship of their 
own, and who refused to attend the Protestant sermons and 
schools. (3) A mass of people without convictions, who ap- 
plauded Farel's triumph, but cried down the more spiritual 
measures of Calvin. Among them were bold, immoral, restless 
men, who claimed a place at the Lord's table, and became the 
nucleus of the Libertines, or free-party, who led Geneva to the 
brink of ruin. They joined hands with (4) the Spirituals, the 
scum of the Reformation, floating wherever good men secured 
the true liberty which the wicked turned into license. They 
were sensualists, who represented God and man as identical, 
sin as a mere notion, and marriage a hateful bondage ; the spirit 
in themselves was the only guide. "God lives in us; his breath 
is our soul; our acts are his acts; Christ had no real humanity," 
Thus taught their pantheistic leaders, Herman and Benoit, 
from the Netherlands, who were heard in a public debate, 
refuted and banished by the council. Their followers were 
allied to the Anabaptists. It is simply just that due weight 
should be given to the age and the city in which Calvin lived, 
and the peculiar contests of his day. Geneva then represented 
"a tottering republic, a wavering faith, a nascent Church," and 
it became "the scene of every crisis and every problem, great 
or small, which can agitate human society." 

Calvin wished to bring all the people into unity of faith and 
make the state a Christian Sparta. The aim was grand, the 
motive pure, the zeal honest, but the methods were not all 
wise or just. The best means were his new catechism, the 
schools, public charities, lectures, sermons, sacraments. But 
the reformers went farther. Early in 1537 the four new syndics 
upheld them even when the council and all the citizens were 
required to swear to the Confession. Many people refused the 
oath. At bottom, the very requirement was an error. Even 



444 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

if proper to demand such an oath of the true believers, it was 
wrong to impose it on citizens, en masse, who did not really 
believe it or whose lives were immoral ; and then decree that all 
who refused it should depart from the city. "Such an enorm- 
ity could not fail to lead to a revolution," says D'Aubigne, 
who shows how the troubles of the next four years grew out of 
"that state-church, that people-church, that shapeless commu- 
nity which comprised the whole nation, righteous men and 
profligates." Calvin's experience would ripen a wiser theory 
of the Church. Our age finds another error in the employment 
of the civil law to purify the Church by punishing vices and 
follies.* "The dances, for instance; do those who reproach 
Calvin for having so strictly forbidden them know what they 
were?" They were means of filling dens of infamy. He escaped 
the worse reproach of ignoring the most flagrant sins and of 
indifference to social reform. We employ merciful discipline 
with moral or spiritual penalties; as a last resort we excommu- 
nicate unrepentant offenders, and there we stop, so far as the 
Church is concerned. But the Genevan reformers had to con- 
tend for the right of excommunication. 

A contest of long years began in this way: Calvin and his 
associates urged that the Lord's Supper should not be admin- 
istered to any persons whose evil lives show plainly that they 
do not belong to Jesus Christ. They had to ask the council 
for the permission to admonish those who were leading evil 
lives ! This was a simple duty of every pastor, but their request 
brought them much abuse and detraction. The council replied: 
"We shall see who is bad, and the bad shall be punished." 
Yet nothing was done. Then they asked the council whether 
certain restless disturbers might not be refused the Lord's Sup- 
per on the next Sabbath (January, 1538). The senate was 
convened, and the reply was, "not to refuse the Supper to any 
one." The reformers were disappointed, but they certainly 
were moderate and patient. "They yielded. This is not the 
crime of which they are commonly accused." 



* Calvin attained a far more spiritual idea of the Church than Zwingli, and 
yet held, in 1560, that, "as it is the duty of the magistrate, by punishment and 
corporeal coercion, to purge the Church from offenses, so it behooves the min- 
ister of the Word to relieve the magistrate by preventing the multiplication of 
offenders." (Institutes: Book IV, Chapter XI, iii.) 



THE REFORMERS BANISHED. 445 

The result was hailed as a triumph by the rising Libertine 
party. Bands of men paraded the streets, brandished swords 
at those who had sworn to the Confession, jeered them as 
"brethren in Christ," ridiculed holy things, reveled in taverns, 
and gloried in their admission to the table of the Lord. The 
exciting elections of the next month put in office four syndics 
and a majority of councilors who were bitterly opposed to the 
reformers. 

Five April days (15-20, 1538) threw more storm into the 
ecclesiastical sky than even Farel had seen in Geneva. The 
usual shout of the rabble, when a preacher had lost favor, was, 
"To the Rhone!" It was now raised in the streets, but, as 
usual, no one was flung into it. Calvin said to the council: 
"I pledge myself to yield to the decision of the general synod." 
But the council twice ordered the preachers, in three of the 
churches, to administer the Lord's Supper at Easter in the 
Bernese manner — with unleavened bread — and appointed magis- 
trates to see that it was done. ' ' If you refuse you are forbidden 
to preach." They did refuse, and some of them preached. 
The result was that Calvin, Farel, and the blind Courault — an 
aged, eloquent exile from Paris — were expelled; not for any 
minute code of social laws, nor for a "stern theology," but 
really for guarding the Lord's table from the vicious people, 
who now danced, gambled, reveled in wine and gallantry, and 
boasted of their triumph. 

Berne gave to the banished ministers refuge, believed their 
defense, protested against the wrong done, saw them honored 
in the general synod at Zurich, joined in the strong plea that 
Geneva would take back her pastors, and sent ambassadors to 
make good their entrance. When near Geneva they heard of 
danger; they turned back and escaped the twenty ruffians lying 
in wait for them. Farel resumed his charge at Neuchatel. 
Calvin journeyed down the Rhine. 

VII. Calvin at Strasburg (1538-41). 

We must not think of Calvin as an exile only, for three 
years, resting on a side-track and merely freighting his Institutes 
for a return on the main line. He was extending the line into 
the Lutheran domains, and along it we shall find the German 
Reformed Church. If the entreaties of the Strasburgers had 



446 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

not drawn him to "the Antioch of the Reformation," we might 
read far less of his influence in Germany. If he had remained 
there, we might hear nothing of the sternness, severity, and 
theocratic rule, imputed to his second residence at Geneva. He 
was one of the hardest workers at Strasburg. As professor of 
theology he lectured daily on the Scriptures to students from 
far and near cities. He revised and edited the French Bible of 
Le Fevre and Olivetan. His pen was marvelously busy as an 
author and conciliator. His treatise on the Lord's Supper 
pleased Luther. At four German synods he and Melancthon 
labored for the union of all true Protestants. The Genevan 
reformer accepted the Augsburg Confession.* 

Calvin was also the pastor of about fifteen hundred French 
exiles, whom he organized into a church — the first in that age 
on a thoroughly presbyterian basis, and not under civil rule.f 
It was a famous model. Its elders and deacons met him once 
every week for prayer, advice, and Biblical study. If he could 
not preach his four sermons a week, one of them took his place. 
In his diligent pastoral care he led even Anabaptists to faith in 
Christ. One of them was the same Herman whom he had seen 
expelled from Geneva for pantheism. Another was John Stor- 
der, whose highly respected widow, Idelette de Bure, became 
the wife of Calvin (1540), who described her as a great soul, 
"the ever-faithful assistant of my ministry." 

By conciliatory letters he had sought to keep "the relics 
of the dispersed Church of Geneva" in unity, quietness, and 
hope of deliverance. "Still go to the Lord's Supper," he 
wrote, "although the pastors admit the unworthy." But Sau- 
nier and Mathurin Cordier, an exile from Paris, where he had 
been Calvin's favorite professor, refused to take the Supper 
from these pastors, and also to administer it when the council 
so ordered. They were at the head of the school which had 
grown into a prosperous college wherein the ancient languages, 
the sciences of the time, and the Bible were taught as Geneva 



* "Nor do I repudiate the Augsburg Confession (which I long ago willingly 
and gladly subscribed) as its author has interpreted it." Calvin to Schalling, 
1557. He did oppose the use made of it afterwards by the Cardinal of Loi-raine 
to deceive the French Church. 

f "The French Church here increases every day. Many students and learned 
men come hither from France on account of Calvin." (Sturm.) This church 
was Lutheranized about 1555. 



BRING BACK MASTER CALVIN. 447 

had never known them. They were banished, and the students 
scattered to near and distant homes. The persecution of the 
faithful was bitter. Then came lawlessness, riots, and anarchy. 
The Romanists expected to gain the city. Thirty-five priests 
were finding entrance. Cardinal Sadolet wrote a captivating 
letter to the Genevese. It seemed half Protestant ; it broached 
justification by faith, but the Church (and where was there any 
Church except the Roman?) must be their teacher and hope. 
Many leading Huguenots felt a throb of the old blood, and 
wished for a reply to it. They looked in vain until their city 
was astir over a letter of Calvin. Was he now to be their 
deliverer? Was this his noble revenge? He treated Sadolet as 
a polished scholar, but tore up insinuating popery by the roots. 
He touchingly referred to his conversion, to his experience in 
Geneva, to his fatherly love for her Church. It was manly, de- 
vout, and so bold that it ran through Europe like startling news. 
Huguenots began to say, "Oh for one hour of John Calvin!" 
Jean Philippe, the leader of the very syndics who had ban- 
ished him and ruled in the spirit of ruin, went to a scaffold for 
treason and riot. The others perished disgracefully. The re- 
action put four good syndics in their place, in 1540, and in 
September the council ordered Perrin, one of its members, ' ' to 
find means, if he could, to bring back Master Calvin." For 
one year letters, heralds, committees, councilors, were going to 
Strasburg. James Bernard and other pastors wrote, ' ' Come ; thou 
art ours." Farel entreated ; Viret preached in Geneva, softened 
political rancor, obtained the recall of Philippe's banished chil- 
dren, brought minds and hearts more to the Gospel, and begged 
Calvin to come. The reply was, "Again I tell thee, no place 
so much alarms me as Geneva." It was hard for Strasburg to 
let him go. In September, 1541, he slowly, quietly, returned. 
Luther had rushed from a castle to Wittenberg with more 
heroic daring to save the Church ; Calvin must apologize for 
visiting Farel on his way ; the people received him with a warm 
affection, and the council showed a marvelous readiness to heed 
his advice in restoring the Church from the wreck. 

VIII. The Restoration at Geneva. 

The registers of the council show how carefully it provided 
a house, new gown, and ' ' salary for Master Calvin, who is a 



448 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

man of great learning, well fitted to build up the Christian 
Church, and exposed to heavy expenses from strangers who 
come this way. Resolved to retain Calvin here always ; and 
that he shall have yearly five hundred florins,* twelve measures 
of wheat, and two casks of wine ; and shall take the oaths 
here." After some months he was settled for life in that 
house. There he endured the frequent illnesses which too close 
study had brought on him. He found it grow lonely as death 
took away, one by one, his three only infants, and his wife 
(1549), and fellow-workers whose calls he enjoyed. 

He was soon at work. ' ' I declared to the senate that a 
Church must have a settled government, such as is prescribed 
in the Word of God, and was in use in the ancient Church. 
Then I touched gently on certain points. I requested a com- 
mission to confer with us. Six were appointed." Six coun- 
cilors and the company of ministers — Viret being one of them 
for six months — framed the new constitution of the Church. 
Doubtless Calvin was the chief author, yet the councils so 
amended it that we can not tell just what he pressed, and what 
he yielded. Theoretically, at least, the Church and the state 
were each independent of the other, in its own domain, yet so 
allied that each gave to the other its support, f Practically, 
the councils retained a lofty power over the Church, and Calvin 
conceded it as a policy for the place and the time. This new 
constitution was adopted by the general council of the people 
on the 2d of January, 1542, the date of "the Calvinistic Re- 
public." The next year Calvin was chosen as one of the 
three revisers of the civil constitution. For the new code of 
laws he has been accorded high praise by eminent judges. 
Not the cross, but the monogram of Christ, I. H. S. — Jesus 
Hominum Salvator — was placed on the coin, the banners, and 
the public buildings. 

Calvin secured for the Church these rights : (1) Authority 
for her ministers, called pastors and doctors (teachers), and all 

* About two hundred and fifty francs at that time; now equal to about 
seven hundred dollars. The tradition of Sadolet's visit and admiration of Cal- 
vin's mode of life is doubtful, yet consistent with Calvin's economy. He had 
no desire for wealth or display. 

t " We at length have a presbyterial court, such as it is, and a form of dis- 
cipline, such as these disjointed times permit. Do not think that we have ob- 
tained it without great effort." (Calvin, Letters, 14th March, 1542.) 



THE VENERABLE COMPANY. 



449 



on an official equality ; (2) their ordination by ministers ; * 
(3) representation for her people by elders, elected, or re-, 
elected, every year ; (4) excommunication of persistent offend- 
ers, as a last resort, by (5) a spiritual court alone — the con- 
sistory. Only the second and third of these rights were entirely 
free from limitations by the civil power. Ministers and elders 
must take an official oath before the council. But no other 
reformer had yet restored all these rights in so high a degree. 
For the Genevese Church he claimed independence ; in purely 
religious affairs he won for it self-government. It was not a 
union of several "local churches" in the city, but one Church, 
with several parishes, "temples," and collegiate pastors who 
rotated in the pulpits. Hence we do not there find ' ' Church 
sessions," as with us. There were three ecclesiastical courts. 

1. The Venerable Company of Pastors. In it were all the 
ministers of the small canton. It was quite like our "minis- 
ters' association," with certain powers of an American presby- 
tery. It carefully examined, and ordained, candidates for the 
ministry. It elected pastors, and, when they were approved 
by the council and the congregation, installed them. All pas- 
tors were elected for a year. It took oversight of the manners, 
morals, doctrines, and various duties of the pastors and teach- 
ers. It promoted good fellowship, mutual aid, and excellent 
preaching. It censured lesser faults and defects in the mem- 
bers; a more serious offense must be judged by the consistory; 
a grievous crime fell under the civil power, and the proof of 
guilt involved deposition. Bungener says : ' ' More fortunate 
than her sisters of German Switzerland, who had, and still 
have, for their bishop the civil government, the Church of 
Geneva always had her own bishop — the Company of Pastors." 
They had charge of the faith. 

2. The Consistory, which had special charge of the morals 
of the people. In it were the ministers, and twice as many lay 
elders. At first it was "the session" for the Church of the 
whole city, or a group of congregations in the country, f It 



* ' ' The laying on of hands belongs only to the ministers. It must not be taken 
away by the magistrates, who have here more than once attempted it." (Calvin.) 

|So in Scotland for a time. "We think that three, four, more or fewer, 
particular kirks may have one eldership [session] common to them all." (Book 
of Polity, 1581.) In a place where there was but one minister, he and the lay 

29 



450 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

was the court of discipline. If its advice, or censure, or se- 
verer punishment was not heeded by a persistent offender, the 
council took up the case, and inflicted a sorer penalty, such as 
a fine, or banishment. It carried its inspection farther into 
private life, and invaded more personal liberties, than we should 
approve among us ; but it had to deal with grosser manners. 
The design was to raise the moral standard, educate conscience, 
use moderation, and employ censures as medicines for curing 
public disorders. Calvin laid great stress on private means of 
correcting faults and vices, and upon the instruction of the 
ignorant by simple lessons at home, by catechisms, by the 
visits of pastors and elders, and by preaching. The system did 
promote the happiness, industry, and safety of all the people 
who cared for good order and social purity.* A French ref- 
ugee one day exclaimed, "How delightful it is to see this 
lovely liberty in your city!" A peasant woman replied, 
■ ' Lovely liberty ! We were once obliged to go to mass ; now 
we are obliged to go to sermon." But the sermon was in- 
tended to lead her to the truth which would make her free 
indeed. 

3. The Synod. In it sat the representatives of the consis- 
tories. If Churches, such as Berne and Lausanne, had no 
elders, they sent laymen from their civil councils. At first the 



elders came to be the consistory of Swiss, French, Dutch, or German Reformed 
Church, or the session of a church wherever the Scotch polity prevailed. 

* Bernard Ochino, an Italian reformer and refugee from persecution, wrote, 
in 1542: "In Geneva, where I am at present residing, excellent Christians are 
daily preaching the pure Word of God. It is constantly read, expounded, and 
openly discussed, and every one may propound what the Holy Spirit suggests to 
him, just as it was in the early Church. On Sundays the catechism is explained, 
and the young and ignorant taught. Cursing and swearing, . . . impure 
lives, so common in other places where I have lived, are unknown here. Gam- 
bling is rare ; benevolence so great that the poor need not beg ; lawsuits have 
ceased ; no simony, murder, or party spirit ; but only peace and charity. No 
organs here, no noise of bells, no showy songs, no burning candles [as at mass], 
no relics, pictures, statues, farces, nor cold ceremonies." This reformed monk 
gathered in Geneva a church of Italian exiles. Dr. Benrath has lately done 
much to rescue him from many imputations of error that have long rested upon 
his later years. The judicious Hooker, a moderate Anglican, said of the Genevan 
polity which regulated morals and manners, "This device I see not how the best 
of men then living could have bettered, if we consider what the existent state of 
the Genevese did then require." Montesquieu has written, "The Genevese may 
bless the day when Calvin was born." 



CHOIRS OF CHILDREN. 45 I 

synods appear to have had advisory rather than judicial powers. 
Calvin allowed them a high authority. Geneva was slow in 
paying much regard to a synod, whether local or general. The 
time came when " regular synodic action was of the very es- 
sence of the Calvinistic system." Calvin and Bullinger, along 
with the learned and eminent Vadian, of St. Gall, secured the 
unity of the Reformed Swiss Churches in doctrine. Calvin 
prepared the Consensus of Zurich on the Lord's Supper, 1549, 
and the Consensus of Geneva on Predestination, 1554, and by 
these the Zwinglian Churches were brought over to a more 
thorough Calvinism. The Reformed Synod of Switzerland be- 
came a strong and renowned body. 

A General Council of all the Protestant Churches was sug- 
gested by Cranmer, to secure harmony of faith, and show a 
strong front to the Roman Council of Trent. ' ' Would that it 
were attainable!" replied Calvin (1552); "the Churches are so 
divided that human fellowship is scarcely now in any repute 
among us. Could I be of any service I would not 

grudge to cross even ten seas, if need were, to obtain a prop- 
erly adjusted agreement upon the rule of Scripture, by means 
of which Churches, though divided on other questions, might 
be brought into unity." The grand project was favored by 
many eminent reformers. But wars were enough to defeat it, 
and the later renewals of it, so that it was left for some other 
age more nearly to realize. 

Doctrine and discipline were not enough ; Calvin sought 
devotion by means of a simple liturgy, and the service of song. 
He had Marot's psalms printed, with common tunes. Even he 
disclosed some poetic abilities. A master, paid by the coun- 
cil, trained choirs of children, and when they had learned a 
psalm they "sang it at the next sermon in a clear and loud 
voice, the people following it in their hearts, till, little by lit- 
tle, all could sing." This hymnal was enlarged by Beza with 
music by Goudimel and Franke. 

By this threefold system of theology, polity, and worship, 
Calvin offered a solution of many problems of his age. It was 
readily accepted by the Reformed Churches of Switzerland, 
France, the German states, Holland, and Scotland. It gave 
creed and constitution to the Presbyterian Churches of Eng- 
land, Ireland, America, and Oceanica. "A local work," says 



452 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Guizot, "does not spread in this manner unless it responds to 
some great instinct of humanity, to the general condition of 
men's minds, and to the wants of the time. Calvin's ideas 
were larger than he himself knew. While debating with the 
syndics of Geneva, he was really working for much greater 
states, some of them not then founded." It is singular that the 
same professor of logic at Paris trained the two greatest organ- 
izers of that century — Calvin and Loyola — whose legions were 
to meet on many a field. We do not shrink from any com- 
parison, or contrast, between their systems, as to culture, activ- 
ity, enterprise, honesty, beneficence, and solidarity. The one 
was the strength of Protestantism, the other of Romanism. 
The one advanced civil and religious liberty ; the other has 
often been repressed, even in papal lands, for its craftiness and 
misrule. The little faults in the one would have been high 
virtues in the other. Sternness was better than deceit. As to 
missions, Francis Xavier's wonderful work of ten years (1542- 
52) in distant Asia was superficial and transient; and, while 
Calvin and Coligny saw their colonies in America destroyed by 
Jesuits and Spaniards, they made Geneva the training school, 
and France the field, for missionaries whose successes were 
marvelous and enduring. 

After 1543 Calvin's life was devoted mainly to the labors 
of a daily preacher and pastor-general ; to the care of Protest- 
ant refugees from Italy, Spain, France, and the British Isles ; 
to the wants of the crowded hospitals, in which he would have 
faced the plague * if the council had not restrained him ; to 
journeys in behalf of the reformed Churches and the Walden- 
ses ; to that wide correspondence which reveals the heart of 
warm friendships ; to the controversies wherein are his severest 
epithets; to the lectures which took the form of enduring com- 
mentariesf on nearly the whole Bible ; to the training of men 
for the ministry in the far-famed academy; to the extension of 
his system in other lands, and its defense at home, and to that 
personal culture which made "the man, in spite of his faults, 

* Calvin wrote, March, 1545, "A conspiracy of men and women has lately- 
been discovered, who, for three years had spread the plague through the city. 
After fifteen women have been burnt [by the state council], some men punished 
more severely, some suicides in prison, and twenty-five prisoners still held, the 
conspirators do not cease to smear the door-locks of houses with their poisons." 

TNote V. 



CALVIN. 453 

one of the fairest types of faith, earnest piety, devotedness, 
and courage.' ' The history of the man is largely that of the 
entire reformed Church in various lands. 

Of course there were defects in the man and in his system. 
But the worst faults of the man appeared when he was defend- 
ing the best features of a system of doctrine and order which 
he believed involved the highest welfare of his fellow-men, the 
security of Christ's Church, and the glory of God. The most 
grievous of them may be explained by the spirit of the age, 
the circumstances in Geneva, and especially by one fact — the 
revival of the Libertine party. They do not appear at Stras- 
burg, nor scarcely even at Geneva, during those five years when 
her judicious historian, M. Gaberel, says, "The most vigilant 
of police forces failed to discover more than eleven offenses 
against public worship, between 1541 and 1546; a country 
deserves warm praise in which religious feeling leaves so little 
room for transgression."* But take the next nine years, from 
the time that no one was found to answer his little book 
" against the fanatical [changed to fantastic] and furious sect of 
the Libertines, f who call themselves Spirituals," to the time 
(1555) when that party was conquered in its armed treason and 
rebellion, and when Calvin was the leading patriot and states- 
man Avho secured the victory and the day of thanksgiving to 
God for his great mercies — and you seem to have two Genevas 
before your eye. In one are the majority of the citizens and 
the welcomed exiles, the students of theology and the devout 
worshipers, in the churches, all growing in faith, morals, and 
social bliss, and delighted with their liberty. In the other are 
men and women of wild doctrines, who may at first be too 
harshly treated, but the crimes of Gruet are blasphemy and 

*Some troubles in 1544. (Calvin Letters, I, 416.) 

t April 28, 1545, Calvin wrote to Margaret, Queen of Navarre, who had 
been somewhat misled by the French Libertines, "I see a sect the most ex- 
ecrable and pernicious that ever was in the world. I see that it does harm, 
and is like a fire kindled for general destruction, or like a contagious disease 
to infect the whole earth. ... I am earnestly entreated by the poor 
believers, who see the Netherlands already corrupted, to put my hand speedily 
to the work. Yet I have put it off a whole year to see whether the malady 
would not be lulled to sleep by silence." The next month Calvin was visiting 
the Swiss Churches and Strasburg to obtain relief for the Waldenses of Prov- 
ence and Dauphiny, whom Francis I was endeavoring to exterminate. (Let- 
ters cxxix to cxxxii.) 



454 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

treason, and those of Favre, " old, rich, and stupefied by vice," 
are divers acts of debauchery : yet around such men gathers a 
party, and it grows in vice and treacherous plotting until ever}' 
real liberty and happiness is likely to go down under the 
reign of licentiousness. Was Calvin to let his Geneva perish ? 
"Nine years he was [almost] every moment on the point of 
being, not conquered, but crushed ; he was to expect every 
month and every week to be expelled from that city which he 
was continuing to render illustrious and powerful abroad : for 
nine years he guided Geneva as a vessel on fire, which burns 
the captain's feet, and yet obeys him." Rarely if ever, else- 
where, has public opposition to a man been so controlled by 
his personal influence, that a republic finally honored him as 
the father of her liberties. 

After 1549 his gentle wife was no longer at his side to com- 
fort him when the lion was irritated by the stings of men who 
called bad dogs by his name, almost jostled him into the Rhone, 
sang vile ditties and fired guns under his window, or yelled 
about the cathedral while he was lecturing to students who 
were in drilling for courageous preaching and even martyrdom. 
Exiles had come with all sorts of ideas, and the freeness of 
discussion in Geneva is too often overlooked. No other city, 
in that age when toleration was nowhere publicly understood, 
gave shelter to more men who boldly assailed the cardinal doc- 
trines, not of Calvin alone, but of Protestantism. It is not 
claimed that he was an apostle of toleration, but he deserves the 
credit of three facts ; one, that the councils had a part, and often 
the chief part, in the severest measures ascribed to him ; a sec- 
ond is, that all the reformers, who gave an opinion, sanctioned 
his course, even when it was most severe ; a third is, that these 
severities fell upon men in the degree that their teachings, or 
alliances, appeared dangerous to the sworn faith, the civil and 
religious polities, and the very liberties of the republic. Lselius 
Socinus, of Italy, a learned young exile, eager for knowledge, 
had doubts concerning the divinity and atonement of Christ, 
but he was not a disturber. Calvin loved him, manfully chided 
him for "floating in airy speculations," and wrote to him as a 
"brother very highly esteemed by me." Their followers would 
more sharply contend in Poland. Others were far more severely 
censured, yet allowed to go in peace from Geneva. It was 



MICHAEL SERVETUS. 455 

Berne that thrust Gentiles into the flames. Bolsec will hardly 
be claimed as an Arminian, out of time and place, when he 
assailed predestination, and all the pastors of the city. He was 
tried by the laws and banished, as a seditious disturber of the 
peace, and all the Churches found what he was when he vexed 
them, resumed the monk's hood and wrote a meagre "Life of 
Calvin," which even Romanists now treat as a monstrous libel. 

In the very heat of those trying years Michael Servetus* 
barely escaped a stake at Vienna, and if the Romanists had 
burnt him there, he would have been simply one victim among 
untold thousands whom Rome executed for their Protestantism, 
and not for his pantheism and his grossly immoral doctrines. 
He was arraigned by Calvin's agency, and burnt, in 1553, by a 
Genevan Council when it gloried in acting free of Calvin's power. 
And Bolsec said it was right. The deplorable act was advised, 
or sanctioned, by far worthier men, even the gentlest of the 
reformers — Bullinger, Melancthon, Bucer, Peter Martyr, the 
Lutheran Chemnitz, the English Jewel — and by the several re- 
formed Churches whose opinion was asked. Protestantism had 
not yet freed itself from the mediaeval spirit and law against 
heresy, blasphemy, and sedition, nor revealed the tolerance 
which was latent in its own principles. 

If Calvin was too forward in causing the arrest of Servetus, 
he still deserves the weight of one fact. During the trial he 
feared that his whole work in Geneva was overthrown when 
Berthelier, a Libertine leader who had been justly excommuni- 
cated by the consistory, was unlawfully restored to communion 
by the Lesser Council. That council wished to have the entire 
power in trying Servetus ; it was testing Calvin by taking away 
a right which he had won for the Church. It secretly advised 
Berthelier, " if he can, to abstain from the Supper for the pres- 
ent," but left Calvin to "fence the Lord's table" courageously 



*Of Villeneuva, in Spain; wandered about Europe; known by Calvin for 
twenty years ; aimed at universal knowledge ; his attainments in natural science 
and medicine were creditable ; verged upon Harvey's discovery of the circula- 
tion of the blood, and published a Sabellian book. He sent his " Restitution 
of Christianity" to Calvin. After his escape from Vienna he came rather se- 
cretly to Geneva, where his affiliation with the opponents of Calvin made him a 
dangerous refugee. By remaining there he made himself accountable to the 
severe laws (older than Calvin), whose deathly penalties were devices of the Me- 
diaeval Church and state for blasphemy, heresy, and conspiracy. 



456 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the next day, to hang in doubt of his own official safety, and 
to preach a tender sermon, in the afternoon, which he publicly 
said might be his last in that city. The crisis had come. After 
this the Council judged Servetus by its own laws against blas- 
phemy, heresy, and turbulence,* laid a check on Calvin's 
power in the state, refused his plea that the poor convict might 
be executed by the sword rather than by fire, and soon gave 
back to the Church the right of excommunication. It was 
wrong to burn Servetus — wrong to have laws that would fix 
the stake on the Champel ; but it was right to support Calvin 
in his just measures, by all lawful power, and save Geneva from 
falling into obscurity, popery, or even worse ; right to fix the 
doom of that unbridled minority which rapidly sank into trea- 
son and rebellion, and ended when its leaders passed under the 
executioner's ax, or into banishment. In 1555 it was Calvin 
who again saved Geneva and the Reformation. 

His remaining nine years were largely devoted to the re- 
formed Church in France, where it had just begun its organiza- 
tion. Geneva was its center of light, its source of supplies, the 
refuge for its children. He had planned a university; worked 
up the original funds by going from house to house ; traced on 
a keystone the words, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning 
of wisdom;" shivered and parched with quartan ague while he 
was daily carried to the walls to see them rise, and to cheer 
the workmen; and in June, 1559, he thanked God and the 
large assembly of people for the academy. Just before this, 
"my lords of Berne" had turned the pastors and professors 
out of Lausanne, because they insisted upon the right of the 
Church to excommunicate vicious members. Five chairs of the 
academy were given them. Beza was its rector and professor 
of theology. Viret preached in the city again for two years 
with wonderful success. 

But Calvin is wearing away. He often drops in to see how 



* Guizot, in his sketch of Calvin, says, "It is my profound conviction that 
Calvin's cause was the good one ; that it was the cause of morality, of social 
order, of civilization. . . . Servetus obtained the honor of being one of 
the few martyrs to intellectual liberty; whilst Calvin, who was undoubtedly one 
of those who did most toward the establishment of religious liberty, had the 
misfortune to ignore his adversary's right to. liberty of belief." Michelet says 
that the acquittal of Servetus would have been the triumph of the Libertines 
and the ruin of liberty. 



DEATH OF CALVIN. 457 

John Knox and Whittingham get on with the Genevan Bible 
(1560), which is to take such a hold upon the people of English 
speech. He will preach and lecture, though his lungs bleed; 
he will still write those great letters and revise his books, 
though a London bishop entreats him to work less and live 
longer for the whole realm of Protestantism. When he can no 
longer sit in the council or the consistory, those dignified 
bodies come to his bedside, hear his last words to them, 
talk of "the majesty of his unselfishness," and go thence, 
assured that "God has a use for this Church and will maintain 
it." And then comes Farel, "my sound-hearted brother and 
matchless friend," brisk at seventy-five, and lately gratifying his 
ruling passion for missions on wide tours of preaching. The 
two men shut the door, and spend an evening too near heaven's 
gate for this world to hear them. It was entered by "the 
father of Geneva's Church" about fifteen months after her 
restorer "went to God, May 27th," on a Saturday's sunset, 
1564, not quite fifty-five years of age. "The poor flock in the 
Church wept for the loss of their faithful pastor," says Beza. 
' ' The academy was bereaved of its true head ; all people in 
common bewailed their beloved father and chief comforter next 
to God." His body was laid in a simple grave, over which he 
forbade any monument* Beza intimated, and Dr. Schaff says 
of this lawgiver and organizer of the reformed Churches, 
"Like Moses, he was buried out of the reach of idolatry." 

Thus, through many a contest which honored it, the Geve- 
van system of theology, polity, and worship was established in 
a city admirably adapted to its wide extension. It unified all 
the Swiss Churches, f It was rendered still more popular by 
Theodore Beza (15 19-1605), the son of a noble family at 
Vezelai in France ; a brilliant amateur of the Renaissance ; 



*A small stone now marks the supposed spot. A recent visitor standing 
there, and wishing that the uncertainty of tradition could be removed, said, 
"John Calvin is dead; that is certain.'''' The guide responded, "Dead? yes, 
dead here; but, my dear friend, he lives every-where !" 

t Calvin, doubtless, did more than any other man to settle the sacramenta- 
rian controversy. His middle view between Luther and Zwingli brought both 
the Swiss Churches into harmony. They held that the bread and wine represent 
Christ's body, and when received by believers in faith, they convey the benefits 
of his death to the soul, he being really but spiritually received, and they 
being also the symbol, pledge, and seal of spiritual life. 



458 THE HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

almost a troubadour while in the Roman Church with two 
benefices, and among priests who applauded his wit and lively 
songs ; a young lawyer at Paris, rather more in gay society 
than at the bar; and kept out of the priesthood by an unpub- 
lished marriage, which was honorably maintained. The prodi- 
gal came to himself and to his Heavenly Father by an illness, by 
the Holy Spirit, and by a remembrance of the lessons of Mel- 
chior Wolmar, who had so drilled him in Greek that he be- 
came a learned critic, editor of the Codex Bezae, and expositor 
of the New Testament. He says, "As soon as I could walk 
again, I broke all my chains, packed up my goods, and left my 
country, my parents, my friends, my earthly all to follow Christ. 
I went to Geneva with my wife (1548)." Poor now, and self- 
helping, he resolved to be a printer in the house of John Cris- 
pin, the author of a History of Martyrs. When Calvin was 
ransacking offices and shops for young men to train for the 
pressing work of the Churches, he must have found Beza, 
whose merit soon put him into the chair of Greek at Lausanne. 
He there formed a Waldensian Church. We saw how he 
came to take Calvin's theological chair at Geneva. The two 
men were ardently attached to each other. "Calvin had a 
severer logic, a more penetrating vision, a stronger will. Beza 
had an easier eloquence, more winning manners, more social 
qualities, and the powers of a diplomatist." He was said to be 
more Calvinist than Calvin (Calvino Calvinioi), and this gave 
him a leadership in the greatest debate that has yet divided 
Protestants. For in Holland his "high Calvinism" nourished 
the party which expected his former pupil, James Arminius, to 
maintain it; whereupon the professor became a leader on the 
other side. Beza was an oracle in theology to the Anglican 
Whitgift, and in polity to Cartwright the Puritan, and Melville 
the Scot. In France he was well known as the fine preacher to 
thousands, the keen debater with Romanists, the chaplain in 
Coligny's army, the presbyter bishop at Synods of the Hugue- 
nots, and the historian of their Church. We shall see more 
of his foreign influence. 

At home the hardest blow of the remaining Libertines did 
not rouse Beza out of a healthful sleep. This wretched party, 
chafed by exile, sold themselves to the Duke of Savoy and the 
pope. They appeared once more in the famous escalade — 



JOHN DIODATI. 459 

December 12, 1602 — which was so nearly the grave of Genevan 
liberty. The duke's troops were scaling the walls by ladders in 
the night. The people were roused ; they rushed to arms and 
saved their city. The aged Beza " heard nothing of all the 
noise of the guns and bells that were fired and rung the best 
part of that night, and in the morning he was extremely sur- 
prised to see so many persons who had been killed in the town. 
He was too old to preach, but he went into the pulpit and 
caused the one hundred and twenty-fourth Psalm to be sung, 
which hath been sung on that day ever since. The council 
ordered that day to be kept forever as a day of thanksgiving to 
God Almighty.* 

Beza placed in the chair of Hebrew a young man of great 
vigor, John Diodati (1 576-1649), the son of an Italian refugee. 
After 1609 ne was tne professor of theology. His Italian and 
French versions of the Bible are now growing in their influ- 
ence. Geneva sent him to the Synod of Dort (161 8), where 
his voice was closely heeded. In 1646, the admired Sir John 
Evelyn, an English author, wrote in his diary, "I heard Dr. 
Diodati (pastor of an Italian Church) preach in French and 
after the French mode, in a gown with a cape, and with his hat 
on. The Church government is severely Presbyterian, 
but nothing so rigid as either our Scots or English sectaries of 
that denomination. ... A little out of town is the Cam- 
pus Martius. Here, on every Sunday, after the evening devo- 
tions, this precise people permit their youths to exercise arms, 
and shoot with guns, and long and cross-bows. ... I 
was as busy with the carbine I brought from Brescia as any of 
them." Thus closed a European Sabbath in his time. 

If Sir John thought that the Westminster Assembly, in 
which he declined to sit, did not "go on in a prudential way," 
he may have found a few sympathizers in the five Swiss schools 
of theology, although there was yet no marked departure from 
Calvinism. Berne and Lausanne felt the power of the state 
too heavily to attain a free individuality. Basle was eminent for 
the Oriental scholarship of the Buxtorfs, with their zeal for the 
inspiration of the Hebrew vowel-points. Zurich led in Church 
history, and stood firm for the canons of Dort. Geneva was 
still the chief center of the Reformed theology. Her first 

*Le Merrier, Hist, of Geneva, 1732. 



460 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Turretine was in his grave (163 1) ; her second was yet to write 
his great Institutes, and the third to open the door to a lib- 
eralism by which her school was uncrowned. 

IX. The German Reformed Church. 

This heroic Church was of the Swiss type ; her language 
that of Zwingli, her settled doctrine mainly that of Calvin, and 
her mediative spirit that of Melancthon. These are her three 
fathers. Her own sons now differ as to the precise influence 
of each upon her childhood, growth, and habits. She was long 
like an orphan, unsheltered by the peace of Augsburg (1555), 
but with irrepressible energies of self-help. With a marked 
individuality, she framed her own creed, won her right of ex- 
istence, gained possession of states and developed her theology, 
polity, hymns of praise, love of union and mystic piety. 

I. The Palatinate, and Heidelberg Catechism. When the 
Lutheran superintendent, Tileman Heshus, and his deacon 
quarreled about the eucharist at Heidelberg, the capital, and 
tore each other's hair at the altar, it was time for some peace- 
able adjustment. They were both sent off by the new elector, 
Frederick III (15 59-1 576), a sort of King Alfred in his simple 
life and his zeal for learning, good schools, and charitable insti- 
tutions. One of the noblest of the German princes, he was 
the first to throw his shield over the followers of Melancthon, 
who was a native, and the reformer of the Palatinate. Its 
university had reared the Preceptor of Germany, twice offered 
him its chair of theology without success, been reorganized on 
his plan, and become a war-camp of parties. His polity, al- 
most Zwinglian in simplicity, had now been nearly swept 
out by the zealot Heshus. The reaction had come. By the 
advice of Melancthon, in 1560, the elector called an assembly, 
which voted for the Calvinistic doctrine of the eucharist. He 
put reformed professors in the university, and teachers in the 
schools of the country. 

The Heidelberg Catechism, published in 1563, was one re- 
sult of this movement. It was framed, at the elector's request, 
by two young professors at Heidelberg, both Germans, yet 
personally familiar with the Swiss reformers, and confirmed in 
their doctrine and polity. One was Caspar Olevian, who la- 
bored to establish the Genevan Church government in the 



SECOND HELVETIC CONFESSION. 46 1 

Palatinate, but did not fully succeed. The chief author was 
Zachary Ursinus (Baer), the pupil of Melancthon, a special 
favorite with Calvin, and an associate of Bullinger for a time. 
This catechism, adopted by the synod and intended for the 
Churches and schools of a province, found acceptance far be- 
yond the land of its birth. Its clearness, moderation, catho- 
licity, conciliatory spirit, warmth, faithfulness to the system 
which it explains, home -going questions and heart -revealing 
answers, made it the one and only permanent creed of the 
German Reformed Church in all lands, if not the most popular 
of all Calvinistic symbols. ' ' It has not died in three hundred 
years; it will live as long as there is an evangelical Church." 

Great creeds are few; some of them came from single minds. 
In serious years, and especially during the pestilence of 1564, 
Henry Bullinger wrote out a statement of his personal faith, 
and added it to his will. It might have remained hidden for 
eleven years if two demands had not risen : one from the 
Swiss, ^ who sought a closer bond of union for their Churches ; 
the other from the Palatinate, where Elector Frederick was 
threatened with exclusion from the Peace of Augsburg because 
he had so Calvinized his province.* He wished for a clear and 
full statement of the reformed faith, so that he might defend 
himself from the charges of apostasy, dissension, and heresy, 
at the next Imperial Diet. He had his wish ; for, by request, 
Bullinger sent him his own private confession. With this, at 
the diet, 1566, the elector made such a manly and noble de- 
fense of his faith, says Dr. SchafT, ' ' that even his Lutheran 
opponents were filled with admiration for his piety, and thought 
no longer of impeaching him for heresy." One of them, 
Augustus of Saxony, said to him, "Fritz, thou art more pious 
than all of us." 

This was not all. Beza had already gone over to Zurich, 
met other Swiss theologians there, joined with them in the 
desire for a bond of union ; and so Bullinger's statement was 
turned into the Second Helvetic Confession. It was adopted, 
and issued in the. names of the Swiss Cantons and the Pala- 



* He had brought in a catechism on which some anonymous Lutheran 
wrote: "This is Anabaptist heresy" — "Abrogation of the Gospel" — "a lie, 
and against God's Word." Such intense convictions, not then very exceptional, 
throw light on the history. 



462 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

tinate. Next to that of Heidelberg, no other reformed symbol 
was translated into so many languages (even Arabic and Turk- 
ish), and sanctioned by so many national Churches. It marks 
an era of stronger creed -statement and closer alliance in the 
Calvinistic ranks. 

The Elector Louis VI (15 76-1 5 83) spent about seven years 
in a vigorous effort to Lutheranize the Palatinate. Six hundred 
Calvinistic ministers and teachers were banished. The form of 
Concord, fresh from its authors, was the new faith. But the 
stiff wind veered when John Casimir, who had fought on 
Coligny's side, restored the Heidelberg Catechism, sent off the 
Lutheran preachers, called back the exiles, walked in the way 
of his father Frederick, reared the next Frederick in strict 
Calvinism, and insured the prosperity of that system there 
until the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. 

II. Most other Calvinized German states have a quite simi- 
lar history. In most of them the Philippists claimed the right 
due to first occupancy ; in all, the local creeds finally gaye way 
to the Heidelberg Catechism. Bremen expelled for a time 
(1 563-1 568) fourteen Lutheran preachers, and permanently es- 
tablished the reformed system. Anhalt and some other prov- 
inces might have remained Lutheran if there had been tolera- 
tion in Saxony. The Saxon elector, Christian (1 586-1 591), 
restored the Philippists, who had been banished in 1574,* and 
wished the union of all parties. His chancellor, Nicolas Crell, 
aiming to avoid extremes, repressed controversial sermons, 
abolished exorcism in baptism (to which the Lutherans clung), 
released Peucer, put Phillippists into the chairs of the universi- 
ties, pastorates, and schools, and began to publish a Bible w T ith 
notes in the spirit of Melancthon. All this brought a reaction. 
The next rulers deposed the professors of Wittenberg and 
Leipsic ; threw leading ministers into prison, or banished them ; 
required officials to make oath to the new Articles (drawn up 
chiefly by Dr. Hunnius, 1592, and strong against Calvinism); 
held Crell ten years in prison, and then beheaded him for 
constructive treason. So Calvinism had its second exile from 
Saxony. 

Peucer and others Calvinized Anhalt. The Earl of Lippe, 
1599, banished saints' days, signing with the cross, exorcism, 

*See Chapter XVII, Note II. 



JOHN SIGISMUND. 463 

the host, candles, Luther's catechism, and the resistant clergy ; 
and established Calvinism. The same system was confirmed in 
Cleves ; also in Hesse-Cassel by four synods and Landgrave 
Maurice (1604). More important was the conquest of Brand- 
enburg, the cradle of the Prussian Empire. John Sigismund 
was obliged to make oath and thrice give bonds, to his rigid 
father, that he would adhere to the Lutheran Church. Proba- 
ably his social relations with the Palatinate and Holland inclined 
him to their creed. After he was about five years on the 
throne (1608-19) he openly and conscientiously avowed the 
reformed faith in the cathedral at Berlin. His wife and most 
of his subjects refused to adopt it. When the Wittenbergers 
assailed him violently, he abolished their Form of Concord, and 
put the University of Frankfort into Calvinistic hands. The 
Augsburg Confession, in its author's later form, was recognized. 
A confession, drawn chiefly by himself, was moderate and con- 
ciliatory. A prominent fact is that he was the first German 
ruler to grant religious toleration in his realm. He laid the basis, 
and from that time German reformed princes and theologians 
sought union with the Lutherans. It would come in two hun- 
dred years ! 



464 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



Chapter XIX. 

FRANCE, HOLLAND, AXD SCOTLAND. 

1555-1&43. 

I. The Huguenots of France. 

Until the year 1555 the Reform in France wanted privilege 
leadership, and organization. It was in repression. Numberless 
martyrs testified to its power. Its adherents were largely of 
the middle classes — tradesmen, thinking people, artists teach- 
ers, lawyers, and physicians were among them. Rural tenants 
were waiting to see what the lords of the soil would do, or for 
pastors to enter their cottages. Two forces were needed; a 
ministry bold enough to face the persecuting powers, organize 
the converts, and preach wherever it was possible; and a nobil- 
ity to stay the oppressing hand of the king, support preachers, 
erect chapels, and set an example to people of all ranks. By 
the royal edicts no heretic had a right to hold property, or 
offer a petit:::: to king or parliament, or make a plea in the 
courts. King Henry II refused Lutheranism, and thought he 
had crushed it. Just then came sturdy Calvinism, the hardest 
tiling then on earth to be killed. Its human forces were in 
the ministry reared by Calvin at Geneva, when he educated 
French exiles, and in such young nobles as the Coligny broth- 
ers, and the Bourbon princes. By the ministry the Reformed 
Church was organized; by the princes and nobles the Hugue- 
not party was brought into a military struggle. 

I. The period of organization (1555-62). A few Churches 
may have been formed before 1555 on the model which Calvin 
had furnished at Strasburg. but they were not influential. It 
must be set up in Paris. There La Ferriere, a wealthy provin- 
cial, made his residence, and drew to his house Bible-readers 
of the Latin quarter where Calvin had once held his little meet- 
ings. He wished to consecrate his infant child to the Lord in 



REFORMED CHURCH IN PARIS— COLIGNY— CHANDIEU. 465 

baptism, but would not call a priest. He must have a minister 
of the Protestant faith. Why not also have a church and a 
regular pastor? He finally gained his point. Thus the first 
reformed Church in Paris was founded, 1555, with John Ma- 
con as its minister, sent thither from Geneva. Its members had 
risked their all on earth. It was speedily imitated at Meaux, 
and in the south-west where Calvin had raised up missionaries 
twenty-three years before, and where Margaret of Navarre had 
sustained preachers. Suddenly all Western France was trav- 
ersed by heroic men w T hose hearers could not be kept dispersed 
by magistrates nor mobs. The listening tens became thousands. 

Gaspard de Coligny, of noble birth, heroic in war, high in 
office as Admiral of France, had come from a military prison 
with the Gospel in his thoughts, and retired to his estates at 
Chatillon-sur-Loing. His generous-hearted wife, Charlotte La- 
val, "wonderfully given to the reformed religion," soon helped 
him make his home a model for the nobility. In his hall he 
had Bible-reading, psalms, and prayers every day; his tenants 
being often present. To his servants he gave Testaments, and 
forbade profane swearing. He established schools among the 
poor, and sustained preachers in villages. He became an elder 
in the French Reformed Church, receiving letters from Calvin, 
and giving his voice in the synods. Soon Madame Renee was 
his neighbor at Montargis, and of great service to the good 
cause. His brother Andelot followed his plans on his estates in 
Brittany. The eldest brother, Odet, was called the Protestant 
cardinal of the reform, in which noblemen were soon enlisted 
by scores. 

Antony Chandieu left his rich estates near Macon, and his 
legal studies, learned theology at Geneva, braved the royal 
edicts, came to Paris at the age of twenty-two, and made actual 
the plan for a union of all the Protestant Churches of France 
in one Confession of Faith. In May, 1559, when a scaffold 
was waiting for every man of them, ten or twelve pastors of 
such churches as Dieppe, Orleans, Tours, and Poitiers, met 
quite secretly in Paris and organized the National Synod. The 
Confession and entire presbyterian system carme from Geneva. 
Very soon presbyteries were established. So rapid was the 
growth of the reform, and so respectable its character, that the 
papal party took alarm. Its voice was heard in parliament and 

30 



466 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

was scarcely stifled by the execution of the eloquent Du Bourg 
for his bold speeches. The death of this martyr to liberty and 
truth led men to think and reason. The Romanist historians 
affirm that his execution did more harm to the old Church than 
a hundred ministers could do with all their preaching. But 
the persecutions became more fiery. ''Death was made a car- 
nival" in Paris. The provinces were fields of slaughter. Yet 
a cardinal wrote in 1561: "The fourth part of this kingdom is 
separated from the Roman communion. . . . They have 
with them more than three-fourths of the men of letters. " He 
agrees with another papal witness: "In many provinces meet- 
ings are held, sermons preached, and rules of life adopted after 
the Genevan manner. Only the peasantry go zealously to the 
Churches; all others have fallen away, especially the younger 
nobles. Religious freedom must be granted them or a general 
war must come." 

The royal court hoped for a theological triumph at the 
colloquy of Poissy (1561), but it seems that Beza more than 
defended his cause against the cardinal of Lorraine and the 
Jesuit Lainez. The main result of the debate was that it gave 
the reformed a higher position and won some converts. To it 
had come Peter Ramus, once a young coal-burner near Noyon, 
then a student fighting against poverty all his way through the 
Parisian colleges, and now master of an academy there. He 
wrote to the cardinal : "I was led to the holy truth by your 
speech. You admitted that the first centuries of Christianity 
were a golden age; that since then all have grown more and 
more corrupt. I take the age of gold." He became an elder 
in the Church, and advocated the theory that the presbyterian 
power lodges in the congregation, and not in the consistory 
(session) nor the synod. He was a forerunner of Des Cartes in 
philosophy. He sought to ally reason and authority, diverged 
from Calvin on predestination, and had a great influence upon 
the reputed founder of Arminianism. 

Another convert to Beza's doctrine at the colloquy was 
Queen Jeanne D'Albret, the Deborah of Navarre, the coming 
heroine in Huguenot battles, a far nobler personage than her 
husband, King Anthony, and a nurturing mother to the re- 
formed churches of Navarre and Beam. No other human hand 
was more powerful in the Huguenot movement than hers at the 



THE PERIOD OF RESISTANCE. 467 

time when it seemed to be fatally checked. Soon after the 
colloquy a pastor on the border of Navarre wrote to Farel: 
''Three hundred parishes in Gascony have put down the mass. 
Four or even six hundred preachers are needed in France." At 
Toulouse there were fifteen thousand believers, and far up in 
Brittany the reform had swept the province. The papists had 
circulated stories of abominable crimes committed by the Prot- 
estants, but these might now be silenced, for Queen Catherine 
de Medici thus informed the pope: "By a singular favor of God 
there are among these people no Anabaptists, none holding 
monstrous opinions, nor any who oppose the apostles' creed." 
Coligny now hoped that she would prove a second Esther. At 
her request he took a census of the reformed Churches in 
France, and reported two thousand one hundred and fifty well 
organized, all of them in the vigor of youth, loyal to the gov- 
ernment, and simply asking liberty of conscience and of faith. 
With them the alternative was not "Liberty or Revolution" 
until the papal party enforced their merciless edicts, and mobs 
resorted to violence against the Protestants. 

II. The period of 'resistance (1,562- -72). The reformed Church 
did not rise in revolt against persecution ; her nobility took arms 
against political aggression. The direct causes were these: (1) 
The throne was the mere tool of powers behind it. Francis II 
had not half the ability of his wife, Mary of Scots, and she was 
managed by her uncles, the Guises, one of them being the 
Cardinal of Lorraine, and others the dukes Francis and his son 
of the same name. They had brought the country almost to 
ruin. Charles IX, the next king (1560-74), was first controlled 
by the Guises, and next by his mother, Catherine de Medici. 
Still later she was willing to serve the interests of the great 
Roman party in Europe, whose champion was Philip II, of 
Spain, and whose purpose was the reduction of all Protestant 
lands to the papacy. (2) The oppressions of the Guises, who 
were charged with the persecutions, gave rise to large numbers 
of malcontents among all classes of people and of both religions. 
They wished to see the king more independent of Guisian craft, 
the parliaments more powerful, and the states-general, who had 
not been convened for seventy-six years, restored to their priv- 
ileges. They looked for help to the Bourbon princes, Louis of 
Conde, and Anthony the King of Navarre. (3) These Bour- 



468 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

bons, being of royal birth, hated the Guises, who were not of 
royal blood, and yet were virtually kings. They adopted the 
reform, drew to them the Protestant nobles, and took revolu- 
tionary measures to release the young king from the Guisian 
control. Thus came into existence the French Huguenots, who 
probably took that name from Geneva, and whose original aims 
and schemes were mainly political. If their first revolt was 
just they erred in not fighting out the battle to the end. In 
the series of Huguenot wars they felt each time driven to take 
up arms; they won some favorable terms of peace, such as the 
right to hold meetings outside the walls of towns; they saw 
their treaty violated by the royalists or by the unpunished mob ; 
they again rushed into the field to be enticed into some other 
" Huguenot rat-trap," and all this time they failed to realize 
that the great league between the pope and Philip II was gain- 
ing form and force. At last, in 1568, when they were driven 
far down into the South-west, terribly beaten at Jarnac, their 
leader Conde slain, and Coligny distrusted by his comrades, 
the widowed queen, Jeanne of Navarre, rode into the field with 
her son, who was afterwards Henry IV of France. Shouts of 
welcome ran along the lines. She knew how to touch a soldier's 
heart. She halted where all might hear, and said, as reported 
by De Thou: 

" Children of God and of France! Conde is no more! He 
has sacrificed his life for the noblest of causes. . . . You 
weep! Does the memory of Conde demand nothing but tears? 
Let us unite, summon back our courage, and defend the cause 
that can never perish! Does it cease to be just and holy? 
No. God has raised us up brothers-in-arms worthy to succeed 
him — Coligny, Rochefoucauld, La Noue, Rohan, Montgomery. 
To these brave warriors I add my son. Make proof of his 
valor. ... I offer you all I have; my dominions, my treas- 
ures, my life, and, what is still dearer, my children." 

"Lead us to the field!" cried the warriors. "Hail to the 
Prince of Navarre! He shall be our chief!" Thus Henry, six- 
teen years of age, was the elected Protector of the Huguenots, 
with Coligny as the lieutenant-general. And when Coligny 
buried his valorous brother Andelot, grieved over the woes in 
the South, learned that his home had been desolated, and that 
he was burnt in effigy at Paris, read the edict which degraded 



GRAND MARCH. 469 

his children and made him an outlaw to whom all were forbid- 
den to give food or shelter; and when his army was again cut 
down at Moncontour, and his face shattered by a rifle ball, and 
all seemed lost, Jeanne D'Albret rode out from La Rochelle 
post-haste through all sorts of perils, and gave him the hand 
from which every jewel had gone to maintain the war. She 
had genius, and if Coligny had possessed the worthy ambition 
of William of Orange, who had just left him to fight out the 
great battle in the Netherlands, it is thought that he might have 
founded a republic in Southern France. Raised again to his 
feet by the help of this chivalrous queen and of foreign Protest- 
ants, Coligny set out on his grand march across the broad 
country to Nismes, and thence north almost to Chatillon. The 
court was surprised ; Paris was in alarm. This man, who had 
such a marvelous power of retrieving himself after defeat, might 
be storming the capital in three days. Catherine began to see 
that this was not a merely local war, for Coligny was aided 
covertly by Elizabeth of England, and by German princes. A 
middle party — "the Politiques" — saw that Philip II was really 
the grand enemy of France, for by schemes of war and mar- 
riage he intended to bring all Western Europe under his sway. 
They urged peace, and were really the agents of the famous 
treaty with Coligny, whom they respected as one of the purest, 
noblest, most honest, and loyal of men. He was always ready 
for a fair treaty, and this one of 1570 granted to the Huguenots 
all that they had ever asked. It guaranteed to them pardon, 
safe residence, the right of appeal, toleration, the restoration 
of property and churches, and liberty to worship except within 
the walls of certain cities or in the suburbs of Paris. It was 
doubtless an honest treaty on the part of Charles IX, whose 
mother seems not then to have formed any special plot against 
the reformed chieftains.* Pope Pius V was a chief mourner 
over what he called "these infamous negotiations." 

So the land had rest from war. The Guises were in the 
shade. The sickly, ill-tempered, dissolute Charles, began to 
seem a king. The Politiques had influence. Various schemes 
to unite all parties, ally France with England, and break the 



* No doubt plots had been talked of before and often, and attempts made 
to seize the leaders. Coligny had more than once narrowly escaped arrest, 
poison, and assassination. 



470 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

power of Philip II were devised. Henry of Navarre was to 
wed Margaret, the king's sister. His mother came to Paris and 
suddenly died — perhaps of poison. Coligny was brought to 
Paris in 1572, and was to be sent to the Netherlands to assist 
William of Orange. He did send thither troops of Huguenots 
and Politiques. He was earnest that war should be declared 
against Spain. He was treated by Charles as a father, but 
Catharine hated him, for with such an honest, incorruptible, 
unselfish, disinterested man at court, what could she do to 
retain her power? She studied Machiavelli; she headed an 
Italian clique in Paris ; she resolved to destroy the man whose 
plans were wisely adapted to make France the home of peace, 
the example of toleration, and the arbiter of Europe. Many 
Huguenot chiefs gathered in the hotels of Paris. The wedding 
was celebrated. Coligny was warned by his friends, but he 
knew not how to leave the city. On the 22d of August, in 
the open day, he was shot in the street. The assassin rushed 
from a house, rode away on a swift horse, and the Guises knew 
all about it. Catharine had a hand, doubtless, in the plot. 
But the wound was not fatal ; the Huguenots did not rise in re- 
volt ; they did demand justice. There must be a new scheme. 
Coligny sent for the king, and cautioned him against the wiles 
of his mother. She discovered this, and quarreled with him. 
She and her party of Italians and Spaniards met in secret 
council, and laid their definite plot for a general massacre. 
They terrified Charles into the belief that the Huguenots were 
planning a rebellion. He still entreated for Coligny, until at 
last, in his raving, he said "Then ki-11 all; leave not one to 
reproach me for the deed." 

The St. Bartholomew — Sunday, August 24, 1572 — had not 
fully dawned, nor the great bell struck the signal, when one 
of the most wholesale murders ever known began with the 
slaughter of Coligny. His body was flung out of a window 
upon the pavement, where Guise stood to insult it, and then 
said, ' ' Well done, my men ; we have made a good beginning. 
Forward, by the king's command." The report of this deed 
went to Catherine ; she had the signal bell rung ; other bells at 
once sounded, and every conspirator sprang to his work, wear- 
ing a white cross. The whole city was soon full of rapine and 
butcheries. The houses of Huguenots, previously marked, 



PAPAL REJOICING. 47 1 

were broken open and plundered, the inmates slain, and even 
the little child, that smil'ed and played with the beard of the 
ruffian who carried it, was stabbed and thrown into the Seine. 
No possible crime was left uncommitted during the full week 
of riot and slaughter. It was the holiday of the infernal 
world. Age, culture, scholarship, saved no one on whom a 
suspicion could fall. Peter Ramus paid all he had for the 
friendship and protecting influence of the old lapsed Calvinist, 
the learned Charpentier, a rival lecturer and defender of Aris- 
totle ; but Ramus was horribly slain by students, and Char- 
pentier was one of the few men who wrote in justification of 
the massacre. An officer took one thousand crowns as the 
price of safety from Peter La Place, the eminent jurist whom 
young Calvin had led to the truth at Poitiers forty years before ; 
but the next morning he was treacherously stabbed. Jean 
Goujon, the restorer of sculpture in France, was slain while his 
chisel was clicking upon some decorations for the royal palace. 
Yet there were Romanists who saved the lives of Huguenots for 
the sake of friendship or compassion. The moderate estimates 
are that ten thousand persons fell in Paris, and thirty thousand 
in other cities as Lyons, Orleans, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and 
Rouen. Even if one hundred thousand were butchered, more 
than ten times that number remained. The Parliament sanc- 
tioned the acts of Charles, and branded the memory of Co- 
ligny — justice has reversed the sentence. Philip II is reported 
to have laughed aloud for the first time in his life, extolled the 
event as the most glorious triumph of Christianity, and boasted 
of the total ruin of Protestantism in the earth. At Rome 
there was a jubilee. Pope Gregory XIII publicly thanked 
heaven, decorated his palace with painted scenes of the mas- 
sacre, and issued the medal inscribed Hugonotonim Strages. 

But outside of Rome and Madrid there rose a loud voice 
of horror and condemnation. The Emperor Maximilian II, the 
father-in-law of King Charles, was severe in his protest. The 
English court put on deep mourning. The dying John Knox 
broke forth into a prophecy that " God's vengeance would never 
depart from Charles and his house," and the remaining two 
years of Charles's reign were those of strange maladies, insane 
anger, desperation, and remorse, until his old Huguenot nurse, 
his truest friend on earth, tried to impress the Gospel upon 



4/2 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

him, and he died in 1574, aged twenty-four, saying thrice, "If 
Jesus, my Savior, should number me among his redeemed!" 
Heaven only knows what is his eternal future and the reward 
of Philippe Richarde, his nurse from infancy. 

III. Period of Recovery (1572-98). The Huguenots had lost 
their ablest leaders ; they were stunned, scattered, but not crushed. 
They held La Rochelle and a few other cities in the south, and 
defended them with help from England, where Queen Elizabeth 
stood as the grandest political champion of Protestantism in 
Europe. Catherine lost her power. Her son, Henry III, 
one of the leaders in the massacre, threw himself into the very 
hands of the Huguenots and Politiques in 1576, granted them 
large liberties, and put them on a footing which he could not 
remove, after he betrayed them and lost the confidence of all 
parties. The facts crystallize about movements rather than 
men. (1) The Roman Catholics were divided into two sec- 
tions, and two leagues were formed. (2) The Patriotic League 
of the Huguenots and the Politiques, or Patriots, came to be 
led by Henry of Navarre. During the massacre he had been 
forced to renounce his Protestantism, had narrowly escaped 
death and the temptations of vice (for Catherine's aim was to 
ruin princes by enslaving them to vices), and now he began to 
display those powers which afterwards made him the greatest 
king of France. The Huguenots gained a broader toleration 
in 1576 from Henry III, a most dissolute king, who soon passed 
over to the opposite league. (3) The Jesuits and priests had 
formed brotherhoods in the rural districts. These were a basis 
for the Holy League, headed by Henry, the young Duke of 
Guise. The special objects were to restore the old Church, to 
support the pope, and to use every means to put down Protest- 
antism. Murder was allowable. Any member who violated his 
oath was liable to death. This league seemed to become all- 
powerful. It had the support of the pope and Philip II, but it 
was weakened by a new quarrel, which Heaven seemed to 
kindle, when Henry III was overshadowed by Henry of Guise, 
whom the Holy League was willing to make king. (4) The 
"war of the three Henrys" increased the confusion and an- 
archy. After intrigues and battles the king invited Henry of 
Guise into his cabinet and had him stabbed to death. Then 
hurrying to his mother he said, "Congratulate me; I am once 



HENRY IV. 473 

more king of France, for this morning I have slain the King 
of Paris." The Cardinal of Lorraine was put to death in 
prison. Thus the Guises who had started all the wars were 
extinguished. Catherine, who had ruled and ruined for thirty 
years, died (1589) an object of general aversion and contempt. 
That same year a Dominican monk assassinated Henry III, and 
thus ended the dynasty of the house of Valois, which had 
reigned nearly three centuries. The heir to the throne was 
Henry of Navarre, a true Bourbon. Being under the ban of 
the pope, he had to win it by force. In order to unite parties 
he basely forgot his mother and went over to Romanism, but 
the leading Huguenots seemed to know that he would grant 
them toleration. When he entered Paris in 1594, the Holy 
League was broken, and the son of Jeanne D'Albret was the 
powerful King of France. 

Henry IV was one of the weakest of men in morals and 
religion. His greatness lies in his policy, his royal genius, his 
tolerance, his patriotism, his desire to see all his people united, 
prosperous, and happy, and in his brilliant successes. He 
created an era in human liberty. He and Elizabeth of Eng- 
land were alike in their statesmanship, if he was not even 
more tolerant. His chief minister was the great Sully, who 
was a lad of twelve years at a college in Paris at the time of 
the St. Bartholomew. A friendly Romanist hid him and locked 
him in a cell until the murder was over. In his old age he 
said, "My parents bred me in the reformed religion. Neither 
threats, pleas, promises, nor changes in government have ever 
been able to make me renounce it." Another counsellor was 
Philip De Mornay. He and his wife (not then married) had 
escaped the massacre. By his virtues, wisdom, writings, and 
controversies with Romanists he won the distinction of being 
called the Pope of the Huguenots. 

IV. The Period of legal toleration (1 598-1685). For twenty 
years the Huguenots had enjoyed about as much peace as any 
body else in those wretched times, but they needed some new 
Magna Charta. By the Edict of A T autes, granted by Henry in 
1598, they secured the liberties for which they had long con- 
tended. It was solemnly declared to be irrevocable forever. 
They were under many restrictions, but complete toleration 
was not to be expected in that age. In the social distresses 



474 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of the time they suffered with all other people. But the great 
evil was they had lost spirituality in a sad degree. This was 
one result of the wars, of politics, and of the example set by 
too many of their chieftains. Such men as Sully and Agrippa 
D'Aubigne were more orthodox and zealous in faith than in 
morals. The creed did not much regulate their social con- 
sciences. Moreover, the whole body was still in the condition 
of a defensive party. They could not become religiously ag- 
gressive. Their missionary efforts, like those of the renowned 
Palissy the Potter and Philip Hamelin, must be almost secretly 
conducted. They soon had nearly eight hundred churches. 
They restored their presbyteries and National Synod. They 
had five theological seminaries. Many of their pastors and 
scholars, such as La Place, Rivet, Bochart, Daille, and Claude, 
attained high rank in Christendom. 

The Jesuits, expelled in 1594, were readmitted by Henry 
IV, who feared their revenge, and died by their friendship. 
Ravaillac buried his knife in the king's bosom. Toleration 
seemed lost. If the earlier edicts of Louis XIII (1610-1643) 
could have been enforced, Protestantism would not have spoken 
another word in France. Wars were made upon the Hugue- 
nots. When Cardinal Richelieu found England on their side, 
and could not subdue them, he sought in vain to unite them 
with the Roman Church. This great statesman, the master- 
spirit of the government, wisely enlisted their soldiers in the 
long resistance to Austria, during the Thirty Years' War 
(161 8-1 648).* So patient and loyal were they that few of 
them took part with the Frondeursf against the administra- 
tion of Cardinal Mazarin, and he was so tolerant, for some 
years, that the good old times of the Great Henry seemed 
to return. In 1652 the Edict of Nantes was confirmed. But 
the papal clergy, since they could not persecute, complained 
that their Chuich was persecuted! They entreated the young 
king, Louis XIV (1643-1715), to cause this " unhappy liberty 
of conscience to perish by degrees." In 1656 the reformed 

*Note III to Chapter XX. 

t The War of the Fronde, or Sling, in Paris (1648-54), was a fruitless at- 
tempt of the aristocracy to overthrow the Mazarin Administration. Probably it 
increased the despotic spirit of Louis XIV, who was crowned when a child, and 
did not assume the government until 1661, when he was nearly twenty-three 
years of age. 



THE NETHERLANDS. 475 

were forbidden to hold worship in episcopal towns, and on 
estates belonging to the clergy or monks ; and their ministers 
must preach only where they resided. In 1657 it was decreed 
that churches built by Protestant nobles should be demolished 
when the land passed to a Roman Catholic. A decree of 1659 
forbade the Huguenots, where their worship was not author- 
ized, to sing psalms, even in their own homes, so as to be 
heard outside. That year, the centennial of their first national 
synod, they held the last one convoked by royal sanction. 
Jesuit teachers had got a footing in the reformed college at 
Montauban. In 1660 they provoked the students to interfere 
with their stage -plays. The citizens took the side of the stu- 
dents. This affair was treated as a rebellion against the king, 
whose army destroyed the walls of the city. When Mazarin 
died, in 1661, his friendly policy ceased; when the king said, 
"I shall in future be my own prime minister," the Age of Louis 
XIV began, and with it the saddest era of Huguenot woes. 

II. The Revolt in the Netherlands. 

Commerce has often been a good missionary. Traders go 
where theologians are forbidden. Merchants, soldiers, and 
exiles carried the Gospel early into the rich cities of the Low 
Countries. The Jesuit historian, Strada, says that "neither 
the Rhine from Germany, nor the Meuse from France, sent 
more water into the Netherlands than by the one the contagion 
of Luther, and by the other that of Calvin, were imported into 
the same provinces." This holy contagion was sure to take 
hold of a people who had not forgotten The Brethren of the 
Common Life, who laughed over the keen satire of Reynard 
the Fox, and were proud of Erasmus. Liberty at first shot up 
too rankly ; it was perverted by the Anabaptists ; they were 
greatly reformed by the Mennonites ; but both classes threw 
a suspicion upon the more Scriptural reform. Charles V 
sent the Inquisition there, and during his reign not less than 
fifty thousand persons were martyrs to some form of dissent. 
Philip II so used this engine of destruction as to cause a pow- 
erful reaction. We have three stages in the whole movement; 
for the Reformation led to a Revolution, and this to a Republic. 

I. The Reformation (1 520-1 568). At the Diet of Worms 
an edict was passed to repress heresy in the Netherlands. 



476 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Books were burnt, and the young Augustine monks, Henry 
Voes and John Esch, were martyrs to their Lutheranism. The 
Dutch Testament was translated in 1523. But there was little 
progress until sturdier, more uncompromising reformers entered 
the land, singing the psalms of Clement Marot, and making 
field-preaching immensely popular. Some of the first preach- 
ers were unlearned weavers, tanners, and the like ; but wiser 
men came — such as Francis Junius, the theologian, and the 
learned Frenchman, Lagrange, who galloped to his field- 
preaching on horseback, and fired a pistol-shot as a signal for 
his congregation to give attention. In 1566 Ambrose Wille, 
a student of Calvin at Geneva, made even bolder by the price 
set upon his head, preached at midnight to six thousand people 
on a bridge near Tournay, and the next Sunday to twenty 
thousand at the same place. Every third man among his 
hearers was armed. No one then dared to arrest him. The 
converted monk, Peter Gabriel, caused even greater enthusiasm 
at Harlem. From the whole country people flocked to hear 
him. At Antwerp camp -meetings were attended by fifteen 
thousand or even thirty thousand of the best and wealthiest 
people of the town. In such cities the reformed were five 
times stronger than the Romanists. Their assemblies were 
called rebellions ! But the people went and came, and never 
injured a soul. When the preacher appeared the city was 
nearly empty, and the field was full. The people cared little 
for the old edicts which ordered a man to be burnt if he read 
or gave away a book of Luther or Bucer, Zwingli or Calvin, 
or had in his hand a Bible, or gave bread to a heretic. The 
Inquisition, in a more terrible form than that of Spain, and 
with Cardinal Granville to direct its machinery, could not re- 
press their faith. By this time they had their Belgic Confes- 
sion of Faith, drawn up by Guido de Bres in 1562, and still 
later the Heidelberg Catechism, which fixed Calvinism in Hol- 
land. The French presbyterian polity was adopted. 

These preachers soon had to protest against the iconoclasm 
of the people, but even William of Orange could not check it. 
The provinces were rich in churches and monasteries of the 
finest architecture. But they were full of images and papal ma- 
chinery. A storm of image-breaking swept over the land. It 
had passed through France, where Calvin was not able to check 



THE REVOLUTION. 477 

the Huguenots. But here the outburst was more violent. 
Churches were entered, and art destroyed, not because it was 
art, but because it was idolatrous. Nobody cared for Rubens 
at such a time. The rage was directed solely against images, 
paintings, stained glass, and implements of false worship. Not 
a man was willfully injured, nor a woman insulted. Monks 
and nuns were set free from convent-prisons. A Romanist of 
Valenciennes wrote, denying that the Calvinists had killed a 
hundred priests in their iconoclasm : "I remember very well 
what happened on that abominable day, and I affirm that not 
one priest was hurt. The Huguenots took care not to injure 
the living images." The papists took care to destroy the 
living images of the supposed heretics. It should be said 
that the image -breakers claimed that the churches belonged 
to the people, in common, and that they had a right to 
purge them. 

II. The Revohitioft (i 568-1 579). This iconoclasm and the 
reformatory spirit so enraged Philip II, at Madrid, that he re- 
solved upon vengeance by armed forces. The Duke of Alva 
was sent to reduce the cities to order and peace. He was born 
to be nearer like his master than any one else ; and Motley 
says of Philip, not morally, but politically: "If there are 
vices — as possibly there are — from which he was exempt, it 
is because it is not permitted to human nature to attain per- 
fection in evil." Pope Pius V had desired Alva to take Geneva 
on his way from Italy, and to destroy that "nest of devils and 
apostates." But he reserved his energies, to expend them upon 
Holland. The Council of Blood was established, and the work 
began. In three months eighteen hundred men were sent to 
the scaffold. Counts Egmont and Horn perished. The richer 
the victims, the more money came into Alva's hand to pay 
expenses. The reformers were now called The Beggars {Gueux); 
they had their songs, but every note sung aloud would cost the 
singer his life, if arrested. If one had attended a Calvinistic 
funeral years before, or even whispered that this new doctrine 
would spread, he was liable to death. If one had petitioned 
to have the new bishops removed, or begged for mercy, death 
was his punishment. We need not mention the taxations and 
political schemes. We may judge how all more serious mat- 
ters were treated. Early in 1568 all the inhabitants of the 



478 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Netherlands, except a few persons named, were actually con- 
demned to death as heretics ! 

A leader was wanted. Heaven had reared the man for the 
crisis. William of Orange, the Silent only when it was not 
wise to speak, had been waiting- for the hour to strike. He 
was born, in 1533, in Nassau, of which he was count; and he 
was a descendant of the Emperor Adolph of Nassau. Edu- 
cated a Protestant, a page of Charles V, a frequent messenger 
to other courts, an observer of all that popes and kings were 
doing and planning, he came to know many of the secrets of 
the great papal league which was forming to wipe Protestantism 
out of the earth. He had conformed to the Roman Church, 
but when a free prince in his own country he adopted Calvin- 
ism as his faith. Not his piety, but his patriotism, is the 
eminent trait in him, along with the abilities to make it effect- 
ive. For twelve years he had been singled out as the coming 
leader ; and when all true Netherlander were declared heretics, 
every man, woman, and child liable to be murdered without 
even a hearing before the Council of Blood, he only needed to 
lift a flag, and the whole land would be in revolution. The 
nobles had sung the song of The Beggars in the house of 
Philip Marnix, the lord of St. Aldegonde, a sublime soul, and 
had confederated to check the Inquisition. They had met in 
public for Protestant worship. They had opposed iconoclasm, 
but as strongly opposed the papal system ; and they were her- 
etics utterly doomed. But the trouble was to guide the revo- 
lution, to concentrate its forces, to bring armies under one 
master mind ; and at first William seemed only to fail, that 
Alva might have new causes for his fearless butcheries. The 
St. Bartholomew in France, and the murder of his friend 
Coligny (whose daughter was his last wife), were stunning 
blows to Orange. The land forces were not successful until 
the Sea-beggars in 1572 took the fortress of Brill, and on that 
event was founded the Dutch Republic. The next year Alva, 
with his hands red in the blood of eighteen thousand victims, 
found himself an object of scorn and disgust, and left the 
Netherlands, never to return. Abler men took his place; wars 
and sieges followed. Elizabeth of England helped the Calvinists 
of Holland to national liberty, even while tribulating the Puritans 
of her own realm for their personal freedom of opinions. And 



THE FIRST PROTESTANT REPUBLIC. 479 

finally the yoke was broken ; the first Protestant republic was 
founded. 

III. The Republic (1 579-1648). The seven northern prov- 
inces formed the Utrecht Union, in the name of the king, and 
still fought on to bring their king to terms. Philip declared 
William an outlaw, an enemy of the human race, whom no man 
must feed or shelter, and whom any man might slay for the 
reward of twenty-five thousand crowns ! The seven united prov- 
inces declared their independence (1581), and elected him their 
president. Anxious to relieve a present distress they had no 
dream of creating a republic which would endure two centuries 
and take the lead of all other European countries in the industrial 
arts, commerce, education, culture, and liberty. When William 
was assassinated in 1584 by a Jesuit fanatic, Gerard, who for 
seven years had been one of seven tigers prowling about his 
path, his son Maurice scourged the Spaniards upon the seas, 
and conquered more territory. The independence of the whole 
United Provinces was recognized in 1609 by Spain, and in 1648 
by all the European powers. William was in advance of his age 
in his views of religious toleration, passing beyond Elizabeth 
and Henry IV. "This is the nature of heresy," he said, "if 
it rests, it rusts; he that rubs it, sharpens it. Force 

can make no impression on the conscience." The National 
Synod indorsed this doctrine in 1578, when they sought tolera- 
tion of the Roman Catholics, and pledged it to them. Their 
adherence to it was to be tested by the greatest theological 
controversy which the Reformation produced. 

III. Arminianism in Holland. 

All along there had been in the Netherlands some opponents 
to the Belgic Confession, and strong tendencies toward the 
system of theology which takes its new name from Arminius, 
or James Harmensen (1 560-1609), the son of a cutler at Oudewa- 
*ter. In a land of good colleges he received their culture. He 
passed from the University of Leyden to the school at Geneva. 
There he gave offense by opposing the system of Aristotle and 
advocating that of Peter Ramus, who had caused heated discus- 
sions in all the universities, by his attempts to establish simpler 
methods of reasoning. Arminius silently questioned Beza's 
Supralapsarian doctrine, which was to face him on his return to 



480 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Holland. In his extended travels he found Rome to be "much 
more foul than he had imagined." 

At the age of twenty-six he became pastor of one of the 
reformed churches of Amsterdam. His abilities, great learning, 
piety, integrity, gentleness, popularity in preaching, caused him 
to be sought as an arbiter in a controversy which had enlisted 
the pastors of two cities. There were three parties holding 
these views: (i) Conditional election, warmly urged by Koon- 
hert, who went farther than Melancthon and had been severely 
rebuked by his presbytery. Naturally the censured man advo- 
cated toleration. (2) Supralapsarianism* as taught by Beza. 
(3) The middle, or Sublapsarian doctrine, urged by the min- 
isters of Delft. Arminius was requested to refute the first and 
the last view. It was expected that he would defend Beza's 
doctrine. In his examination of the subject he was led to 
adopt the first-named view, associated with universal grace and 
the freedom of the human will, and to express it in his lectures 
on Romans. 

He was courageously at his post in 1602, when the plague 
raged in Holland. It carried away Francis Junius, professor of 
theology at Leyden. Arminius was chosen to fill his place. 
His colleague, Francis Gomar, an able, rigid, bold, defiant 
champion, charged him with Pelagianism, but after a conference 
manfully withdrew the charge. These two men, now regarded 
as champions, watched each other closely, and had a few lively 
disputes, each appealing to Holy Scripture. In 1604 Armin- 
ius propounded certain theses on predestination, and Gomar 
replied to them. About him were more combative spirits, for 
he said, "Easily could I cultivate peace with Arminius, but 
for the importunity of the churches, and of those deputies who 
are ever opposing some obstacle to my wishes." The curators 
of the university and one or two synods endeavored to allay 
the agitation. But they settled nothing. It was hoped that a 
national synod might be a vast engine to put out the flames 
of controversy which ran like fire through the entire land, and 



* In merely logical order, Supralapsarianism puts election before the fall ; 
Sublapsarianism, after it. "The Supralapsarians have always been a small 
minority among Calvinistic divines. . . . They generally concurred with 
the Sublapsarians in representing the difference as one of no great moment." 
(Cunningham, on Beza.) 



FIVE POINTS OF CALVINISM— SYNOD OF DORT. 48 1 

far over Europe. Arminius desired it, but before it was con- 
vened he died, in 1609, saying, "God has willed that I should do 
no more." His motto was, "A good conscience is a paradise." 
His opponents admitted that he possessed it, and admired his 
manly, benevolent nature, and fervent piety. The University 
of Leyden granted a pension to his wife and children. 

He had trained a successor, Simon Episcopius (1 583-1644), 
who went beyond his master in developing his theology in his 
Institutes — a volume of lectures on theology published after his 
death. President Maurice aimed at too high power both in the 
state and the Church. Being a thorough Calvinist, the civil 
power took the matter in hand, and required the clergy to sig- 
nify their adhesion to the established Confessions of Faith, or 
cease to preach. The other party, in which Grotius and Olden 
Barneveld were political leaders, and advocates for a freer re- 
publicanism, put forth a Remonstrance affirming those doctrines 
which, mainly, were afterwards opposed by the ' ' Five Points 
of Calvinism."* The causes of religion and of politics mutu- 
ally injured each other. The majority of the clergy stood upon 
the National Confessions, but wished that the Church might 
act independent of the state. The minority sought toleration. 

Years of effort brought no peace. In November, 1618, 
the Congress of the Republic convened the famous Synod of 
Dort, and paid the expenses of all delegates. No other assem- 
bly of Protestants had ever come so near being a general coun- 
cil. Fifty-eight of the eighty-four members were Dutchmen, 
and all Calvinists ; the rest were from the reformed Churches 
of Britain, Switzerland, and Germany. Louis XIII forbade any 
Huguenots to attend. No Lutherans were present, their sym- 
pathies not being with the ruling party. The synod has been 
justly praised for the learning and ability of its members. 
None now laud the severity of the civil government, which en- 
deavored to employ it for political purposes. Episcopius and 
his twelve associates — the Remonstrants — felt that they were 
summoned to appear as culpable resistants to the edicts of the 
state, as mere defendants in the synod, and not as free advo- 
cates of their own doctrines. After an earnest and able oration 



*The Five Points: 1. Unconditional election. 2. Atonement limited to 
the elect. 3. Depravity total as to ability and merit. 4. Effectual calling, or 
irresistible grace. 5. Perseverance of the saints. 

31 



482 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

by their leader, protests, papers in defense, and various long 
efforts to be heard as they desired, they were dismissed from 
the synod. Their writings were examined. They were finally 
condemned (April 24th) as " introducers of novelties, preachers 
of error, guilty of corrupting religion, creating schisms, and 
dissolving the unity of the Church." They were deprived of 
their offices until they should repent. Other remonstrant min- 
isters were ' ' handed over to the provincial synods to see if it 
be possible to induce them to relinquish their doctrines ; and if 
not, to be deprived of their offices in like manner." These 
decisions were to affect about two hundred ministers. Many 
of the foreign delegates pleaded for a milder sentence.* The 
synod not only indorsed the existing national Confessions, but 
issued its own doctrinal canons, which make prominent the Five 
Points of Calvinism. 

Meanwhile the civil government unjustly sent the aged Barn- 
eveld to the block (161 9) for alleged high treason. He is now 
honored as a Christian, patriot, statesman, and political martyr, 
who sought more republicanism for his country. For the same 
alleged crime Grotius was sentenced to imprisonment for life. 
In the fortress of Lovestein he wrote the ' ' Truth of the Chris- 
tian Religion." At the end of eighteen months his wife con- 
trived to effect his escape in a book-chest. He won distinction 
as a statesman, jurist, theologian, and commentator, and was so 
tolerant that all denominations once claimed him. 

Many of the Arminian clergy went to other lands. When 
affairs came to the worst the government notified Episcopius 
and his remaining supporters to choose their place of exile, and 
they should be sent thither in carriages, at the public expense. 
A rare kindness, coupled with an injustice, very common in 
those unkindly days ! Some were taken to Brabant ; others to 
Holstein, where they built Frederichstadt. In 1625 Maurice 
died. His brother, a nobler grandson of Coligny, established tol- 
eration. The exiles who returned had their churches and their 
college at Amsterdam (now at Leyden), with Episcopius there 
as professor of theology. After a new race of eminent scholars — 



*The Scotch delegate, King James's chaplain, wrote, " Methinks it hard 
that every man should be deposed from the ministry. Never before did any 
Church of old, nor any reformed Church propose so many articles to be held 
under pain of excommunication." 



THE COUNCIL OF TRENT. 483 

such as Limborch and Curcellaeus in theology, Leclerc and Wet- 
stein in languages and criticism — this body tended to a decom- 
posing liberalism and a rejection of creeds. It is now a small 
Church of about five thousand members in Holland. 

As a theology, Arminianism made rapid conquests. It had 
already been growing stronger among the Lutherans. It divi- 
ded the Calvinists. " It grappled with the Church of England, 
and for more than a century laid it at its feet." It took an 
organic form in the Methodism of John Wesley. Its adherents 
claim that ' ' the Arminians of Holland were the real founders 
of religious toleration on the Continent." The Huguenots 
contend for the same honor. But neither of these bodies was 
in power, as was Sigismund of Brandenburg. In general, all 
the oppressed have been advocates for greater freedom of con- 
science, faith, and worship. The test of their spirit was the 
exercise of political power. 

IV. The Reform in the Roman Church. 

If this be viewed as a self-renovation, its earlier causes and 
advances were similar to those of Protestantism. It moved 
along the same road until it came to justification by faith; that 
doctrine marks the divergence of the ways. There Cranmer 
left Wolsey, and Calvin parted company with Bellarmine. If 
this movement be viewed as a counter-reformation, or a reaction 
from Protestantism, it includes the restatement of Roman the- 
ology, the aggressive work of new and revived monastic orders 
and the papal leagues. The Romanists were impelled to reform, 
lest Protestantism should carry all Europe before it. 

I. The Council of Trent. (1545-63). "The ship of Peter" 
was in a storm. If the managers had been as wise as those 
who sailed with Paul, under the blasts of Euroclydon, they 
would have cast overboard the cargo of mediaeval doctrines and 
superstitions; but they flung in the sea their wisest men, as if 
they were Jonahs; and, after parting with some of the grosser 
evils, they struck land at Trent and made repairs. This famous 
council held five sessions during eighteen years. In it voices 
were heard in favor of reducing the power of the pope, exalt- 
ing Scripture above tradition and Thomas Aquinas, recognizing 
justification by faith, and requiring thorough discipline. But 
they were in the minority. The pope was made the interpreter 






484 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of a new creed and catechism, in which the two theologies of 
the Thomists and the Scotists were left to dwell together in 
the unity of discord. But much was done to consolidate the 
Church, to reform and educate the clergy, to secure pastoral 
work, and promote discipline. The Vulgate was published and 
a Breviary and Missal for general use. 

II. Reformatory Bishops. Carlo Borromeo, nephew of a 
pope, a cardinal and Archbishop of Milan (1560-84), mystical 
in his piety and studious of the Divine Word, went home from 
Trent to expound its catechism, write books, and to bestow 
great blessings on his native province. His zeal against heresy 
and his persecution of certain Waldenses "were essential fea- 
tures of the Catholic reaction." He reformed the morals of 
the clergy, built hospitals for the poor, and spent his remaining 
wealth in personal care of the sick during a plague. "His 
life furnishes the ideal of a Catholic pastor, and now his lofty 
form looks down from a colossal statue upon the streets of 
Milan as the revered patron of the land." 

Francis de Sales, a nobly born Savoyard, highly educated 
by the Jesuits and in the best universities, eloquent, heartily a 
mystic, was a young missionary in the valleys about Chablais, 
and an adviser of the duke who banished the Calvinists from 
Savoy. With the title of the Bishop of Geneva he brought 
"piety to the aid of policy." and labored twenty years (1602-22) 
with little effect on the city, but marked results in the canton 
and the valleys about Mont Blanc. The paleness of Beza at 
his approach must be one of the many legendary miracles 
ascribed to the bishop. This St. Francis learned, and said that 
"more flies are caught with one spoonful of honey than with 
ten barrels of vinegar." Doubtless many Calvinists were won 
by him. He loved little children, taught them catechisms, and 
was so charitable that his servant said: "Our master will bring 
us all to the poor-house." Such a model was he in pastoral 
work that his pupil, Camus, the Bishop of Bellay, put the 
"Spirit of St. Francis de Sales" into six volumes, so that others 
might imitate his ministry. These are among the fairest samples 
of the reform on the Roman side. 

III. The Jesuits were the working men in the reaction. Igna- 
tius Loyola (1491-1556), a Spanish soldier of noble birth, was 
wounded, and in his dreams he began to think of a "spiritual 



THE JESUITS. 485 

knighthood under Christ as the leader." Like Luther, he had 
his distresses of soul, but he turned to lives of the saints, to the 
Virgin Mary, to monastic rigors, to pilgrimages in the Holy 
Land, and all sorts of visions and ecstasies. Like Calvin and 
Wesley, he was a wise organizer. In 1530 Loyola was in Paris 
with Xavier and Lainez, and four other young men, binding 
them by a solemn oath to purity, poverty, and hard service to 
the Church in whatever the pope bade them to do or endure. 
He was the first general of "The Order of the Society of Jesus." 
It was sanctioned by Paul III in 1540. Twenty years later it 
was directed by Lainez, who gave it a more political and inva- 
sive character. Its members were a sort of field-monks, ready 
to be preachers, teachers, missionaries, traders, explorers, or 
politicians. The order used any means to win, every method 
to rule, both nations and Churches. Macaulay says that "it 
possessed itself at once of all the strongholds which command 
the public mind — of the pulpit, the press, the confessional, the 
academies.* Wherever the Jesuit preached the church was too 
small for the audience. ... In spite of oceans and deserts, 
hunger and pestilence, spies, and penal laws, dungeons and 
racks, gibbets and quartering-blocks, Jesuits were to be found 
under every disguise and in every country — scholars, physicians, 
merchants, serving-men; in the hostile court of Sweden, in the 
old manor-houses of Cheshire, among the hovels of Connaught, 
arguing, instructing, consoling, stealing away the hearts of the 
young, animating the courage of the timid, holding up the 
crucifix before the dying. Nor was it less their office to plot 
against the thrones and lives of apostate kings, to spread evil 
rumors, to raise tumults, to inflame civil wars, to arm the assas- 
sin." Expelled from one land they appeared in another and 
regained the lost ground; suppressed by popes they still re- 
mained irrepressible, t Lainez managed the Council of Trent, 



* The popes from 1550 to 1585, with lofty assumptions, gave the Jesuits 
these rights : to enter any university in Christendom, teach, and enforce attend- 
ance on their lectures; to establish schools and colleges wherever they pleased; 
to claim exemption fr.om all secular jurisdiction, and to exercise all episcopal 
functions ; also, the Index Expurgatorius was committed to them with authority 
to correct, change, interpolate, or burn such books and manuscripts as they 
thought proper. 

t The Jesuits were expelled from France in 1594, but readmitted 1604; 
again repressed 1764; from England, 1 579, 1 58 1, 1602; from Venice, 1607; Hoi- 



486 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

and, though Loyola had recommended the study of Aquinas, 
he silenced cardinals who wished the members to indorse 
Augustine. 

The Jesuits made Sweden the first field of their political 
intrigues. About 1578 they won the king over to a secret 
Romanism, and soon the country seemed almost papalized. 
But in the resistance the Augsburg Confession was restored, 
1 593, by the national assembly. Charles IX, the champion of 
Protestantism (1604), secured a law for the banishment of all 
papists. The German states must have all gone over to a Prot- 
estant faith, if the Jesuits had not come with their skill in 
debate, instruction, and diplomacy. They nestled in Ingolstadt, 
and especially Cologne, where Hermann, the prince-bishop, had 
once tried to reform his province on the plans of Bucer and 
Melancthon. From these cities the Jesuits pushed their con- 
quests. Bavaria expelled all Protestants (1565) and established 
the Trent Confession. In Baden-Baden and Treves were similar 
results. About a dozen states, ruled by prince-bishops, such 
as Munster, Wiirtzburg, Mayence, were papal isles in the Prot- 
estant ocean of Germany. The universities of Vienna and 
Prague were centers for the training of Jesuits, who gave their 
special attention to all Hussites, Lutherans, and Calvinists 
between Germany and Turkey. In 1594 Rome won that part 
of Russia which revolted to Poland. In 1621 the Jesuits united 
with the Turkish Sultan in strangling the Calvinism of Cyril 
Lucaris at Constantinople,* but they failed to persuade the 
Russian czar to banish the Lutherans. 



land, 1708; Portugal, 1759; Spain, 1767; the order abolished by Clement XIV, 
1773, but restored by Pius VI, 1814; expelled from Belgium, 1818; Russia, 
1820; Spain, 1820, 1835; France, 1831, 1845; Portugal, 1834; Austria, Sardinia, 
and other States, 1848; Italy and Sicily, i860; suppressed in Germany, 1872; 
when, under ban, they have sometimes taken such names as "The Society of 
the Sacred Heart" or "Fathers of the Faith of Jesus" or Baccanari. 

* A reform in the Greek Church was attempted by Cyril Lucaris, a native 
of Candia, educated at Padua, and a visitor of the Protestant Churches in Ger- 
many and England. At Geneva he received a decided partiality to Calvinism. 
He was Patriarch of Alexandria 1602-21, and then of Constantinople until the 
Jesuits threw suspicions upon him, and the sultan had him strangled, in 1638, 
on the accusation of high treason. He drew up "a well-nigh Calvinistic Con- 
fession of Faith," and sought to introduce it in the face of superstition and 
bigotry. It was a heroic effort. The pope offered the Sultan an immense sum 
of money to have him dismissed, and the Jesuits were rarely guilty of a greater 
crime than their destruction of this noble scholar and virtuous patriarch. 



METHODS OF ACCOMMODATION. 487 

IV. Jesuit Missions. It has been pleaded that the early 
Protestants were not free to undertake foreign missions, except 
where they founded colonies. They had at home the work 
of conquest and defense ; they were eager for the conversion 
of Europe; the roads and seas were controlled by their ene- 
mies. But the Jesuits found men and means for the work. 
The eminent leader was Francis Xavier, whose missionary 
career of ten years (1542-15 5 2) ranks him with heroes, and 
his mystic piety with saints. He followed the track of Portu- 
guese traders. At Goa, in India, he and his few companions 
rang a bell in the streets, drew wondering crowds, told his 
message in half-learned words and eloquent tears, baptized hun- 
dreds with their children, and provided slight means of instruc- 
tion for the nominal converts. At Travancore he baptized ten 
thousand persons in a month. He soon reported whole prov- 
inces of Southern Asia converted to Christ. Whatever amount 
of truth was imparted, the immense success was largely due to 
accommodation and sympathy. Buddhist shrines, convents, 
celibacy, fasts, vows, vigils, pilgrimages, indulgences, priest- 
hood, and images had all gone on before — perhaps from the 
earlier Nestorians — and they were easily adjusted to the new 
system. The convert might retain the beads, amulets, relics, 
bells, candles, so long familiar to him. The people found a 
sympathy and reality which they had long craved. The crucifix 
told of an infinite love, and Christ had more compassion than 
Buddha for human sorrows and the griefs of penitence. In- 
stead of a future transmigration of souls, through beasts and 
birds, ending at last in Nirvanic annihilation, there was an 
eternal heaven of actual life, real bliss, holy society, and the 
fatherhood of -God. If Xavier thought that purgatorial fires 
were needful for Europe, he seems to have covered them in 
Asia, and pointed out a direct road to paradise. 

The Dominicans objected to his methods of accommodation. 
Treating even pagans as heretics, they established the Holy 
Inquisition at Goa, where its headquarters existed for two 
hundred and fifty years (1560-18 12), and widely extended its 
agencies. The Jesuits enlisted in the unchristian work. Chil- 
dren were decoyed or stolen, and reared in their houses. 
Adults were forced to baptism. The machinery for tortures 
was active ; dungeons were rarely vacant. Jews were victims ; 



488 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the Ncstorians of Malabar were quite repressed for a century. 
In our time the Protestants gain about six times more people 
in India than do the Romanists. 

In 1549 Xavier and his little band entered Japan, where 
Buddhism prevailed. After an amazing conquest, he died 
(1552) in sight of China, where he had hoped to preach. The 
Inquisition kindled revenge in the Japanese heart ; also con- 
verted princes used fire and sword against the Buddhists. The 
reaction was tremendous. Perhaps half a million Romanists in 
Japan were so rapidly destroyed that, in 1660, there was 
scarcely a remnant of the "Jesus-sect" left to relate the terri- 
ble slaughter. That island was closed against all foreigners for 
two hundred years. Japan, India, Siam, and China* bear 
witness to the apparent success, but the real failure of the 
Jesuits and Dominicans, and a persistent hatred, which has re- 
quired the heroism of modern Protestant missionaries. 

V. The Propaganda. The famous Congregation for Propa- 
gating the Faith was founded at Rome, in 1622, by Gregory 
XV, and afterwards enlarged, with branches in other papal 
countries. In it were inquisitors for destroying the true faith. 
Dominicans, Franciscans, and other monks were maintained by 
it as missionaries in all quarters. Troops of them came to ex- 
plore the New World, and hold it for the pope. But in earnest 
work the Jesuits, who had their place in the Propaganda, sur- 
passed all other missionaries. 

VI. Jesuit Theology and Etliics. There were some depart- 
ures from the system of Trent. Most of the order were 
Scotists. One of them, Louis Molina of Portugal (1 535-1601) 
published the "Harmony of Grace with Free-will." He pro- 
posed the theory of the scientia media, or mediate knowledge 
(prescience), by which God knows future contingent events 
before he forms his decree. He thus knows the forces which 
will control the acts of a free-willing man. It was also asserted 
that free-will, unaided by grace, can lead the soul to faith, re- 
pentance, love, hope, and morally good works ; and, when 



* Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit, was " the father of the mission in China;" 
was there from 1583 to his death in Pekin, 16 10. The Bible was poorly trans- 
lated. The method of accommodation was carried to an extreme. In 1722-54 
persecution reduced the nominal Christians from eight hundred thousand to one 
hundred thousand. 



THE JANSENISTS. 489 

these are attained, God bestows sanctifying grace, on account 
of Christ's merits. The Dominicans, or Thomists, assailed 
these doctrines as Pelagian. The Jesuits, who were not all 
Molinists, claimed that they might pass as Semi -Pelagian. 
Popes and doctors could not settle the debates of parties. It 
was finally resolved, in 1606, that no decision should be given. 
It seemed wise to preserve the unity of the Roman Church by 
retaining two, if not three, different theologies. 

Such a policy was in harmony with Jesuit ethics, for the 
order sanctioned these principles: 1. The end sanctifies the 
means. 2. Probabilism ; an act is justifiable when some re- 
spectable theologian approves it, or when there is a probability 
of its goodness. 3. Mental reservations; in making a promise, 
or an oath, a man is bound only by his intention, which he 
may reserve in silence. 4. Philosophically, every violation of 
a divine law is a sin ; theologically, the sin consists in breaking 
the divine law with a set purpose and a full consciousness of the 
wrong. Practically, any vice was excused by some theory of 
virtue. An intention of harmlessness offset fashionable sins. 
The attempt was to harmonize piety and secularity. The Book 
on Devotion, by Francis de Sales, was a "Christianity made 
easy" to worldly people. 5. The authority of the pope alone 
comes from God ; that of a prince, from the people. Hence, 
if a civil ruler is a tyrant or heretic, and not approved by the 
pope, the people may depose or kill him. History shows that 
a ruler who did not please the Jesuits was in danger of assas- 
sination. 

VII. The Jansenists made it their business to push to the 
front the doctrines of Augustine, plead for the Gallican liber- 
ties, and expose the ethics and theology of the Jesuits. Their 
earnest effort to reform the Roman Church was the noblest 
ever made by men who remained in it, unless we reckon with 
them the present "Old Catholics." Cornelius Jansen, a native 
of Holland, born in 1585, was a student at Louvain, where he 
became a professor of theology, and where the effort of Baius, 
in 1565, to restore Augustinianism had been repressed by the 
pope. His " Mars Gallicus" — a book against France for allying 
herself to Protestant states during the Thirty Years' War — won 
him the bishopric of Ypres in Flanders. Two years later he 
died (1638), leaving in manuscript the great literary work of 



490 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

his life, the " Augustinus," in which he aimed to present the 
theology of Augustine, some of whose writings he had read 
thirty times.* 

With this book Jansenism entered on its first stage. Despite 
all the efforts of the Jesuits and of Richelieu, it was soon pub- 
lished at Louvain, Paris, and Rouen. The Roman Inquisition 
condemned it ; but this tribunal was powerless in France. In 
1642 Urban VIII unwittingly sent forth a papal bull against it. 
Then the war between the bull and the book was opened. 
The one was not registered at Paris as infallible ; the other was 
so widely and eagerly read that Augustinianism bade fair to pre- 
vail in France. For the one no Jesuit zeal was wanting ; for 
the other a young doctor of the Sorbonne, Antoine Arnauld, 
took the pen which gave him the leadership in Jansenist po- 
lemics. The king often forbade controversy, but royal orders 
were futile among debaters and pamphleteers. 

"The great Arnauld," born 1612, was the youngest and 
most brilliant son of the eminent lawyer whose pleadings in 
parliament had moved Henry IV to banish the Jesuits, in 1594, 
from France. On their return from an exile of ten years they 
had no pardon for the Arnauld family. Antoine mastered their 
theology, rejected it, ardently defended that of Jansen, and, in 
1 641, under a raking fire of Jesuit examiners, won his degree 
as Doctor of the Sorbonne. In the reformatory spirit of St. 
Cyran, he published a book on Frequent Communion. It was 
a plea for contrition of heart, inward purity, and the sacred- 
ness of the altar, the confessional, absolution, and vows of holy 
living. It could not satisfy a Protestant, but it struck hard at 
the laxity of the Jesuits ; for those popular directors of the 
conscience lulled the souls of profligates with the opiates of 
casuistry, nurtured vice at the confessional, and made the 



*The "Augustinus . . . adversus Pelagianos et Massilenses" (Semi- 
Pelagians), in three volumes, was the fruit of twenty years of labor. Jansen 
was aided by his fellow-student, Jean du Vergier, a native of Bayonne, who had 
there entertained his friend ; he had refused the court favors of Richelieu and 
eight bishoprics: in 1620 he became Abbe* de St. Cyran, by which title he is 
best known ; had great influence as a statesman, a writer against the Jesuits, 
and an educator of a new race of pietists and thinkers, while a recluse in Paris ; 
was a spiritual director of the Arnaulds and other Port Royalists; was impris- 
oned in 1638 by Richelieu, who died in 1642, and the prisoner was released, to 
die in ten months. 



THE PORT ROYALISTS. 49 1 

eucharist a consoler of sins. If the Jansenists held elements 
of Calvin's theology, and had his spirit of discipline, they care- 
fully denied that they were Calvinists. They were Thomists in 
their views of the Church and the sacraments. 

Already Jansenism had its school of reformers, pietists, and 
thinkers, called the Port- Royalists. They had their headquar- 
ters at the old convent of Port-Royal, in a deep valley near 
Versailles.* After La Mere Angelique Arnauld and her nuns 
returned to it, in 1648, the men lived near by at the Grange. 
They were recluses who took no monastic vows. Among 
them were the Arnauld brothers and several kindred ; Le 
Maistre, the eloquent lawyer, and his brother De Sacy, who, 
in the Bastile (1666-8), translated the Old Testament into 
French, and portions of the New Testament ; Nicole, Lan- 
celot, and Blaise Pascal (1623-62), whose fresh genius threw 
brilliant light upon science, philosophy, and the evidences of 
Christianity. 

There were three rivals in the educational and literary enter- 
prises, which made the dissolute and military reign of Louis 
XIV ( 1 643-1 7 1 5) the Augustan age of French literature. 
1. The Benedictines, revived and reorganized in the congrega- 
tion of St. Maur, had their center at Paris and reformed 
convents throughout France. They collected fine libraries. 
They had excellent classical schools. By their works upon 
Oriental languages and history, their splendid edition of the 
Greek and Latin Fathers, and their genius for a broad culture, 
they rendered immense services to the Church and the literary 
world. 2. The Jesuits, whose range was narrower and spirit 
more sectarian. Not the classics, but the casuistries of Es- 
cobar, and the ethical theology of Suarez, enlisted their zeal. 
Their policy was to gain admission to all institutions, capture 
them, as at Montauban, and supplant all other teachers. 3. 

-The two Port-Royals. One was the old Cistercian convent (1204), about 
sixteen miles south-west of Paris, in moral ruin when given to Arnauld's young 
sister, Angelique, in 1603, with her fourteen nuns. She reformed it, and helped 
to elevate the thought and piety of vale and city. Malaria and want of room 
induced her and eighty nuns to establish the Port-Royal in Paris, where they 
nourished from 1626 to 1648. This left Port-Royal of the Fields to St. Cyran 
and his friends until the nuns returned; then they lived at the Grange. In 
both houses were many of the Arnauld family and kindred. Other members 
had in one or both houses near relatives. 



492 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

The Port-Royalists, who were in hearty sympathy with the 
classical Benedictines, while they promoted a more practical 
education. They made popular text-books for the schools to 
counteract the methods and teachings of the Jesuits. Port- 
Royal was a model for other seminaries. They soon had rep- 
resentatives in all departments of literature, from the criticism 
and satires of Boileau to the philosophy of Arnauld, who 
opposed the idealism of Malebranche ; from the tragedies of 
Racine to the great Church history of Tillemont and that 
of Dupin ; and from the letters of Madame de Sevigne * to 
the profound "Thoughts" of Pascal, the Moral Essays of 
Nicole, and the Commentaries of De Sacy and Quesnel. 

Jansenism came into its second stage during the angry war 
of the Fronde (1648-54), by the notable five propositions 
which a Jesuit, Father Cornet, drew up and laid before the 
Sorbonne, in 1649, an< ^ asked whether they were heretical. 
He could not decide, nor could any body else, for they were 
obscure, ambiguous, double-faced. He did not say expressly 
that they were an abstract of Jansen's book. If sound, they 
might be credited to Augustine; if heretical, charged to the 
" Augustinus. " One doctor found three senses in them and 
others none at all. They related to these points, briefly stated : 
1. Just men have not sufficient grace to perform some com- 
mands of God. 2. The natural man never resists internal 
grace. 3. Responsibility depends on freedom from coercion, 
not freedom from necessity. 4. Semi-Pelagians erred in saying 
that man can resist or obey prevenient grace as he chooses. 
5. They also erred in affirming that Christ died for all men. 

The Sorbonne was divided. The Parliament refused to 
judge the propositions. Pope Innocent Xf held them two 
years, and then declared them to be rash, impious, blasphe- 
mous, and heretical. The astounded Jansenists seemed to be 

*"This Port-Royal is a Thebaic! ; it is a paradise; it is a desert where all 
the devotion of Christianity has fixed itself; there is a holiness spread over all 
the country for a league round about." (Letters of Sevigne, 1674.) 

tThis jovial pope was not superfinely moral. Of his sister-in-law, Domnia 
Olympia, it has been said that "the power exercised by this woman over Rome 
and the Roman Catholic Church would not be believed, if there were not other 
examples of as great baseness at the Court of Rome. She governed and she 
sold every thing ; she ruled over the sacred college and the tribunals, and her 
will was omnipotent." 



LETTERS TO A PROVINCIAL. 493 

in a dilemma; they must assent to the decision, or deny the 
papal authority. But they did neither; they said that the 
pope might judge rightly as to doctrine {de jure), and yet err 
as to a fact {de facto) ; and they simply denied that the propo- 
sitions, whether true or false, were in Jansen's book, in the 
Jesuit sense. The Jesuits said that they were in the book, in 
Jansen's sense. At the king's request, Grammont read the 
book and reported : "I have not been so fortunate as to find 
them, but they may be there, for all that, incognito !" Affairs 
reached this crisis; all the clergy were ordered to subscribe a 
formula asserting that the five propositions were in Jansen's 
book, and condemning them in the sense of Jansen. Nothing 
but royal and papal violence could overcome the resistance to 
this decree, for half of France seemed then to be Jansenist in 
sympathy, if not in theology. 

Arnauld and sixty other doctors were on the verge of expul- 
sion from the Sorbonne when the Letters to a Provincial, by 
Louis de Montalte, were running through a strictly guarded 
press. All means, but the effective, were used to detect the 
author, who narrowly escaped. ' ' All Europe read and ad- 
mired, laughed, and wept," says Macaulay. Not all, for the 
Jesuits were in tearless wrath over his trenchant wit, keen 
satire, and merciless dissection of their ethics. Hallam affirms 
that by these letters " Pascal did more to ruin the name of 
Jesuit than all the controversies of Protestantism, or all the 
fulminations of the Parliament of Paris." The confessionals 
of the Jesuits were almost deserted, for a time ; their cause 
seemed lost, but they were not in the habit of despair or sur- 
render. They directed the young king's conscience without 
restraint to his vices, and he pleased them by measures of 
violence against the only party which was really true to the 
old Roman Church of Augustine's day. The Bastile was 
crowded with Jansenists. The dying Mere Angelique and 
Pascal saw the Port-Royalists, nuns and all, struck by a perse- 
cution which lasted eight years (1661-69). Then a good 
duchess interested her royal cousin in their sufferings; the new 
pope, Clement IX, no friend of Molinists, tacitly admitted the 
distinction between right and fact, and gave more liberty to the 
Jansenists until the century ended. 

There dwelt at Rome a Spanish priest named Molinos — a 



494 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

very different man from Molina — and his " Guide to Devotion '' 
(1675) was rapidly passing into various languages. It set forth 
the same inward light and spirituality of worship which George 
Fox had taught in England. It reared the Quakers of the 
Roman Church, who, however, complied with its rites while 
denying that outward ceremonies were essential to a Christian 
life. Madame Guyon, noble, earnest in benevolent works, a 
writer of devotional books, mystical in her theories of the 
divine love, was the leader of the French Quietists. The rit- 
ualistic Jesuists felt tacitly censured so long as this free piety 
was tolerated. It somewhat resembled that of the Jansenists, 
and both these spiritual sects must be repressed together. It 
thrust Molinos into the Inquisition. It was condemned by the 
pope. The great Bossuet, so powerful at the royal court, 
turned the French law against the Quietists, or Mystics, and 
his young rival, Fenelon, was obliged to recant his mystical 
opinions (1699) and preach the doctrines of Rome. 

A third stage of Jansenism came in 1694, with a new 
book — "The Moral Reflections upon the New Testament," 
by Pasquier Quesnel, who was one of the exiles with Ar- 
nauld in Holland. This spiritual commentary, still highly 
valued and translated by Protestants, was heartily sanctioned by 
Cardinal Noailles and other French prelates, until the Jesuits 
loaded it with one hundred and one propositions, which Pope 
Clement XI twice condemned as full of Jansenist heresy 
(1708-13). This- fresh assault was merciless. In 1709-10 the 
Port-Royalists, nuns and all, were driven from the sacred 
valley ; the very dead were turned out of their graves, and the 
buildings leveled to the ground. The bull Ungenitus was en- 
forced. Jesuitism had triumphed. Jansenism was repressed 
in France. It was not fairly represented by the later Convul- 
sionaires, with their pretended miracles and prophets. It was 
not an utter failure ; not in its contributions to literature, 
science, piety, theology, and Gallican liberty; nor in the Bi- 
ble Society (1726), which flourished for thirty years; nor in the 
succession of men, who, in the next reign, carried the votes 
of the Sorbonne, and avowed its principles in Parliament. The 
Revolution was its terrible avenger. 

Jansenism had its fourth stage in Holland, where the exiles 
found liberty. They gained the Archbishopric of Utrecht, 



THE REFORMATION IN SCOTLAND. 495 

already quite independent, and became an organic body, with 
three hundred ministers. But their midway position was not 
satisfactory. Some of their clergy went over to the Protestants ; 
more of them conformed to the papacy, and their number is 
now about thirty. They have twenty-five parishes, a theolog- 
ical school, about five thousand communicants, and a union 
with the "Old Catholics." They say, "We must hold fast to 
the unity of the Church, even if the pope never be brought to 
reason," and when the papacy returns to the principles of 
Augustine they will be in union with Rome. 

V. The Reformation in Scotland. 

In a slow northern dawn the Scots had light from three 
universities,* classical schools, and the Lollards. James IV 
(1488-15 13), who maintained the Gallican type of liberty, saw 
that most of the clergy* and monks were ignorant, vicious, liv- 
ing upon a Church that owned about half the wealth of the 
land, and hopelessly unfit to rear the future guardians of free- 
dom. His thought ran, as we find then nowhere else, toward 
compulsory education. In 1496 he secured a law that the eldest 
sons of rich men and nobles should be educated in Latin and phi- 
losophy, or be fined twenty pounds. In this he ' ' builded better 
than he knew." The effects upon the reform may be traced. 

Two things aroused the clergy : the discovery of a few Lol- 
lards to be punished, and the rough satires of Bishop Gavin 
Douglas, and of Sir David Lindsay, who exposed their sloth and 
sins, and helped to reduce their credit with the people. Feudal- 
ism on the Saxon Lowlands and clanship in the Celtic High- 
lands were still powerful. All classes needed culture, the refin- 
ing arts of life, and vital religion. Rude in manners, ill-dressed, 
and wretchedly housed, as they may have been, the Scots had 
a large capacity for elevating principles, and the grip of their 
logic was hard to break. Their reformation was involved in 



*St. Andrews founded in 1410; Glasgow, 1450, where John Major, an ora- 
cle in the sciences, had advanced ideas of liberty : and Aberdeen, 1495, where 
the national historian, Hector Boece, was worthy of the praise of Erasmus. 
John Erskine of Dun placed in the classical school at Montrose a Frenchman 
who taught Greek. John Knox wrote of the thirty-four strongly anti-papal 
articles, charged upon the Lollards of Kyle, in 1494, that by them it "may 
appeir how mercyfullie God hath looked upon this Reahne, reteaning within it 
some sponk [spark] of his light, evin in the tyme of the grettest darkness." 




4g6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

political movements. They had to resist two foreign forces : 
the army of England, while she was growing Protestant ; * and 
the snares of an old alliance with France, whose rulers became 
more papal. By maintaining independence they did not be- 
come Anglican ; they threw off Romanism ; they established 
Calvinism and presbytery, and for these they had another long 
contest with the Stuarts. Their religious independence was 
largely due to three facts : the educated gentry freed themselves 
from the endowed clergy, whose attempted reforms were not 
sufficiently radical ; they organized for a thorough reformation 
of all Scotland ; and they resolved to possess the vast estates 
and revenues which had passed to bishops and abbots. Hence 
lay-patronage and "Tulchan bishops." The reformed organiza- 
tion began mainly with the nobles. Its directors took a baro- 
nial title, "The Lairds of the Congregation," in 1557, and this 
body acted as if the nation were a republic, with a covenant as 
its constitution. By virtually suspending the powers of the 
crown, it saved Scotland. The Reformation became national, 
and yet with no royal sanction; popular, and not episcopal. 
The power of the laity was greater than in any other country. 
The reform had its marked periods. 

I. The period of individual effoii (1525-55). While a few 
gentlemen were reading the Bible to groups of neighbors assem- 
bled in a cave, or in the woods, Patrick Hamilton appeared. 
In him met the old and the new. A relative of the king and 
the young abbot of Feme, he had studied at Wittenberg and 
Marburg, and now (1528) with the blessing of Luther and Lam- 
bert upon him, and a wife at his side, he preached with some 
freedom, and with great effect. The clergy plotted against him, 
sent the king on a pilgrimage to a shrine, decoyed the princely 
preacher into a religious conference at St. Andrews, betrayed 
him, stripped him of his wealth and offices, burnt him, and 
kindled a fire which would consume the papal power in Scot- 
land. Truth, baptized in fire, shined all the more.f 

* Henry VITI urged his royal nephew, James V, 1513-42, to reform the 
Scottish Church on his plan. But James had a French wife, Mary of Guise, 
and the French alliance was more valued by her than a union of the two Brit- 
ish crowns by the marriage of Edward and Mary of Scots. Hence a war (1544- 
50) for the wooing of Mary, who was sent to France, and she wedded Francis II. 

tMen inquired about the new doctrines with such eagerness that a gentle- 
man said to an archbishop, "If ye burn more, let them be burnt in cellars, for 
the reik of Hamilton has affected as many as it did blow upon." 



JOHN KNOX— CARDINAL BEATON. 497 

During the next fifteen years no reforming preacher came 
prominently forward. There were wars and martyrdoms ; leg- 
islative attempts to exclude the writings of "the great heretic 
Luther," and the like of him ; acts legalizing the reading of the 
Bible, and yet forbidding private opinions about it ; discussions 
and conventicles; boxes of books entering the ports and the 
homes of the gentry ; a score of noblemen urging reforms ; 
Cardinal Beaton grasping at more lands and revenues, and sway- 
ing the realm by a power which ignored personal morals ; 
popular cries against his outrages, and the flight of many who 
barely escaped the block. Among the exiles was George Bu- 
chanan, the Erasmus of Scotland, but her Luther remained as 
one "who never feared the face of man." 

John Knox, a chief among the heroes of liberty in the 
British Isles, was born in 1505, near Haddington, where a good 
school prepared him for the University of Glasgow.* Between 
the years 1540 and 1545, he seems to have been ordained a 
priest, and to have taught in some school of East Lothian. 
He read his Bible, Jerome, and Augustine, threw off the scho- 
lastic theology, preached his new faith, was branded as a heretic, 
and hunted by assassins, and degraded from the priesthood. 
His outlook being dismal, he became a tutor in the houses of 
Douglas and Ormiston. The man to whom he was most in- 
debted for truth and example was George Wishart, a brother 
of the Lord of Mearns, and the most advanced, learned, and 
eloquent reformer who had yet appeared in Scotland. In 1544 
he went through the country from Ayr to Perth and Dundee, 
preaching in the fields during a pestilence in those quarters, 
and so rousing the people that they could not be restrained from 
assailing the convents of Dryburgh, Melrose and other towns. 
The English army encouraged such violence upon monasteries 
which aided the French regiments. Wishart traveled with mail-- 
clad barons as his guards, and John Knox was at times his 
sword-bearer. But the preacher was arrested by the agents of 
Archbishop Beaton and burnt at St. Andrews. 

This deed, along with political motives, and possibly the 




* So David Laing, editor of the best edition of Knox's works. He cites 
the Glasgow Register. He finds no evidence that Knox studied and publicly 
taught philosophy in the University of St. Andrews, as M'Crie thought, and 
others have often stated. 

33 



498 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

advice of the English king, nerved a band of nobles to break 
into the castle of St. Andrews, and slay Cardinal Beaton, who 
died saying, " All is gone." He was licentious in his life, and 
reckless in the abuse of his power. He was the greatest and 
last of Rome's cardinal-legates in Scotland. "He fell, and the 
papacy [there] fell with him. To laud him as a religious man 
were idle, for he was not even moral." The nobles took pos- 
session of the castle, and with his patrons went Knox,* whom 
the outspoken preacher, John Rough, impelled into the pulpit 
quite in the style which Farel employed upon Calvin, at Gen- 
eva. There Knox, as chaplain of the garrison, administered 
the Lord's Supper for the first known time in modern Scotland. 
When the castle was surrendered to the French he was taken 
in chains to France, and was for nineteen months a galley-slave, 
in a most inhuman bondage. Liberated in 1549, he preached 
in England at Berwick and London. Edward VI made him 
one of his chaplains, and offered him the see of Rochester, 
which he declined. He had an active part in revising the Book 
of Common Prayer, and excluding from it the formula of tran- 
substantiation. When Mary began her bloody reign, he was 
among the exiles on the Continent. At Geneva he was the 
minister to English residents. Rough, unbending, impetu- 
ous, yet full of humor, and often playful, he bound to him, 
for life, the polished and sedate Calvin. Each abhorred Jes- 
uitry ; each was "a hater of lies," able to win the best men as 
warm friends, f Knox did good service for the Church in his 
ministry at Frankfort to the English exiles, until their zeal for 
Anglican ceremonies caused him to retire. He had more suc- 
cess at Dieppe, where the Huguenots were organizing a Church 
upon the new model at Paris (1555). He reproached himself 
for keeping away from the conflict in his own country, and said, 
' ' I will arise and go to my father-land and work God's work ; 
I will do or die." 

* This was ten months after the murder, and there is no evidence that 
Knox was privy to it. 

tCarlyle. says of Knox, "Nothing hypocritical, foolish, or untrue can find 
harbor in this man ; a pure and mainly silent tenderness of affection is in him ; 
touches of genial humor are not wanting under his severe austerity; an occa- 
sional growl of sarcastic indignation against malfeasance, falsity, and stupidity ; 
indeed, secretly an extensive fund of that disposition, kept mainly silent, though 
inwardly in daily exercise; a most clear-cut, hardy, distinct, and effective man; 
fearing God, and without any other fear." 



THE REFORMING NOBILITY. 499 

II. The period of organization (1555-75). The Roman clergy 
still held the churches. The Protestants had generally attended 
them. Erskine of Dun invited the leading nobles to his house 
in Edinburgh to consider whether they should separate from the 
national Church. By conforming to it the regent, Mary of 
Guise, would hardly persecute them. Her secretary of state, 
young Maitland, a clear-headed man, argued for the practice, 
saying that Paul resorted to the Jewish temple to pay his vows. 
"But the temple-service was of divine origin," said Knox; "the 
mass is not." It was agreed that a separation must come. 
Then began the field-preaching and the conventicles in woods, 
private houses, public squares, anywhere, every-where that a 
preacher and a crowd could be found. The reform depended 
largely on an itinerancy. To this day Scotsmen are justly proud 
of the list of names borne by the reforming nobility. Among 
them were John Erskine of Dun, the restorer of Greek studies 
in this land of his lordly fathers; Archibald of Argyle, greatly 
honored in the North ; Sir James Sandilands, who had been true 
to Wishart and suffered for it in prison, and in whose house, at 
Calder, Knox celebrated the Lord's Supper, as shown in the 
famous picture, for the first time after the Reformation began 
in earnest among the people ; the Earl of Glencairn, who thought 
it no sacrilege to clear the images out of old Holyrood; and 
James Stuart, or Murray, afterwards called the Good Regent, and 
the victim of the plotters who shot him for his goodness. He 
was the illegitimate son of James V,* and the half-brother of 
Mary of Scots (now in France). He had abandoned the mo- 
nastic life, and he became to Knox what Frederick the Wise 
was to Luther. "His house was compared to a holy temple, 
where no foul word was ever spoken. A chapter of the Bible 
was read every day after dinner and supper in his family. One or 
more ministers of the kirk were usually among his guests. . . . 
As a ruler he was inflexibly just." Such were the leaders who 



* James V died 1542; his widow, Mary of Guise, was regent until 1560: 
their daughter, Mary, returned from France, 1561, as queen; she married Darn- 
ley in 1565, and Bothwell in 1567, and fled to England in 1568. Her infant 
son, James, was proclaimed king in 1567, with Murray as regent; Murray was 
assassinated in 1570; successive regents were Lenox, Mar, and Morton, till 
James VI assumed the government in 1578. He became king of both Scotland 
and England in 1603. 



500 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

attended Knox and the itinerants at conventicles, and opened 
their houses and barns to the crowds of people. 

After some months of preaching Knox went to Geneva with 
his English wife, Marjory Bowes, and her mother. They were 
formally admitted members of the English congregation which 
had recalled him. The Romanists, who had once summoned 
him to Edinburgh, but did not appear when he came, now con- 
demned him in his absence, and burnt his effigy. ' ' It was 
better to be burnt a thousand times in effigy than once in 
reality." His pen convinced them that he was still alive. In 
1558 he and several scholars made the English translation called 
the Genevan Bible, long popular in Great Britain. There he 
published "The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Mon- 
strous Regimen (Rule) of Women." It very learnedly denied 
the right of women, especially such as Mary of England and 
Mary of Guise,* to rule a kingdom and ruin it. That first 
blast, and only one of the kind from him, was not forgiven by 
Elizabeth, who shut England against him, even when he was 
her best adviser. No other man more readily detected the 
plots against her throne. 

Meanwhile the leading Scots, imitating "the bands" of their 
fathers, had framed their first Covenant, 1557, and pledged their 
all to the Reform. In it the word congregation, taken from 
Hebrew usage, was so applied to the reformed people that 
the chief subscribers were called the Lords of the Congregation. 
They were a lay-synod, the germ of the later assembly. They 
acted as the directors of an ecclesiastical republic within a per- 
secuting kingdom. The aged priest, Walter Mill, was outra- 
geously slain by the papists, and this deed made more Protestants. 
He was the last known Scottish martyr before the days of 
Claverhouse. The lords called for Knox, who reappeared at 
St. Andrews, in 1559, and a bolder advance was begun. The 
soldiers of the archbishop were ready to fire upon him if he 
entered the pulpit of the cathedral. The regent was near with 

* " Maleficent Crowned Women, these two, covering poor England and poor 
Scotland with mere ruin and horror, in Knox's judgment, and may we not still 
say to a considerable extent in that of all candid persons since? . . . One 
ought to add withal that Knox was no despiser of women ; far the reverse in 
fact ; his behavior to good and pious women is full of respect, and his tender- 
ness, his patient helpfulness in their sufferings, are beautifully conspicuous." 
(Carlyle.) 



BOOK OF DISCIPLINE. 501 

an army. The lords advised him to refrain, but he entered it 
in presence of a large assembly. Priests listened quietly to his 
sermon on the spiritual cleansing of the temple. Nobody in- 
jured him. Three days more he preached. One result was the 
authorities of the town set up the reformed worship, banished 
the images, and pulled down the monasteries. Thus St. An- 
drews became the first Protestant city of Scotland. The lords 
had their troops. They speedily took Perth, Stirling, Edinburgh, 
and other towns. They purged the churches in the iconoclas- 
tic mode, feeling what is ascribed to Knox, that ' ' the best way 
to keep the rooks from returning is to destroy their nests." 
This image-breaking went far beyond the will of Queen Eliza- 
beth, who aided the Protestant Scots against the armed forces 
of the Regent Mary and the French allies. 

The Parliament, in 1560, carried the Scottish Church out of 
Romanism into Calvinistic Protestantism. Prelacy gave way to 
presbytery. Severe measures were enacted against the old 
system. Its intolerance was fought down by another intoler- 
ance which would clear the way for liberty. Knox was "by 
no means fond of public burning as an argument in matters of 
human belief; rather the reverse by all symptoms we can trace 
in him." Yet he thought that "one mass was more dangerous 
to Scotland than an army of ten thousand enemies," and the 
safest thing for a mass-priest was speedy flight. The Confession 
of Faith, drawn up by John Knox and five other Johns, was 
ratified by Parliament. But the Book of Discipline was adopted 
only by the First General Assembly, 1560, whose members 
were six ministers and thirty-four laymen.* The Genevan form 
of Presbytery was established, though with a distinct superin- 
tendency quite like the Lutheran, in order to overlook the work 
and to retain certain revenues which were vested in bishops. 
The superintendents were not prelates; laymen might serve; 
and yet they were bishops in law. In later years they had 
some broader powers, and were humorously called "Tulchan 
bishops," from the tulchan, or effigy of the calf used to illude 
the cow at milking-time. The office drew the revenues. Knox 
did not favor it. He wished the properties of the Church to 



* All the reformed Churches had printed liturgies, and those on the Conti- 
nent retain them. The Scots became averse to every liturgy when the Stuarts 
attempted to enforce on them an Anglican prayer-book. 



502 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

be applied to the support of the ministry and educational insti- 
tutions, and to see a school in every parish. 

Mary of Scots, a widow, with Guisian advisers, returned in 
1 561, as queen of Scotland, and found it a Protestant realm. 
She conceded that fact. She must not interfere with the estab- 
lished system. She was allowed, perhaps not with the gentlest 
grace, to have her own chapel and priest. Her ministers of 
state were Protestant lords. Her most honest adviser was John 
Knox, and she knew it. She had been trained in the court of 
intrigue, inhumanity, corruption, and deceit, where Catherine 
de Medici presided, and still she did not pretend to renounce 
her faith for the sake of policy. Let her have the credit of 
that. But her great fault was that she allied herself secretly 
with the pope and the Guises to overturn the established system 
and restore the Roman Church. In principle she was not more 
tolerant than the boisterous nobles, who loudly complained of 
the mass in her chapel. She sent for Knox, a man of plain 
speech, rather rough for a courtier, not a believer in Mach- 
iavelli, but fully convinced that thorough Protestantism was the 
only means of securing to his country progress, culture, civil- 
ization, liberty, and the eternal salvation of her children. Cal- 
vinism and prosperity, or Romanism and ruin, one or the other, 
without compromise, must prevail. For the one he had openly 
honest measures, rigid as they might appear. For the other 
she had secretly dishonest politics, not less rigid, and even 
more terrible, and he knew it better than any other Protestant 
in all the British Isles. In their stormy interviews at Holyrood, 
when the queen wept, Knox said that "it was hard for him to 
see his own boys weep when he corrected them, and far less 
could he rejoice in her Majesty's tears; but as he was perform- 
ing his duty he was constrained to let her weep on rather than 
hurt his conscience and betray the commonwealth by his 
silence." He and his compatriots were the northern champions 
in the great battle between Rome and the reform, and in it 
Mary went down, because she did not heed the advice of John 
Knox.* When her desperate career had brought her into an 



* Mary's triumph must have checked the Reformation in Scotland, strength- 
ened the league of the pope and Philip II, and opened a wider gate than Nor- 
folk drew for the papists to enter England. Hence the grandeur of Knox's 
position. But if he had failed, heaven must have raised up other champions. 



DEATH OF KNOX. 503 

English prison, where the world has rightly mourned her fate, 
and when Knox was dying, in 1572, after the triumphs of his 
cause, he said : "I know that many have complained of my 
too great severity, but God knows that my mind was always 
devoid of hatred to the persons of those against whom I thun- 
dered the severest judgments." 

The English embassador said of his preaching, "The voice 
of that one man is able, in one hour, to put more life into us 
than six hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears." 
When so infirm that his servant helped him into the pulpit, 
"he at first leaned upon it; but ere he was done with his ser- 
mon he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding 
the pulpit into blads and flie out of it." At his burial, Earl 
Morton said that "he neither feared nor flattered any flesh." 
Both Knox and Calvin are said to have cherished the Old 
Testament spirit ; yet their appeal was to the entire Bible, and 
especially to "Christ's Evangel." 

III. The period of reconstruction and advance to a purer Pres- 
byterianism (1 575-1 592). The Scottish Church needed a new 
charter, and it came through the second reformer, Andrew 
Melville. He excelled all other Scots in his learning. He had 
studied and taught in foreign universities. He began that 
struggle which ran on through sixty-five years, and contributed 
to the rebellion against Charles I in all Britain. In 1575 he 
began to attack the semi-episcopal system, and the jurisdiction 
of the state over the Church. He argued from the New Tes- 
tament that a presbyter was rightfully the highest officer in the 
Christian Church, and that the presbytery (in any form of it 
from a session up to the general assembly) was the highest hu- 
man power over the Church of which Christ was the sole king. 
He gained one point after another until, in 1592, the Second 
Book of Discipline was ratified by the general assembly and 
the Parliament. It greatly freed the Church from civil jurisdic- 
tion, cast aside the modified episcopacy, and gave to every 
congregation, or its elders, the right to elect its own pastor; 
although the lay patron, or lord, might retain the revenues if 



The Protestant spirit was too mighty to be utterly silenced. The Regent Mor- 
ton, 1572-81, threw the reformed Church of Scotland into great peril, but the 
revolution which he stirred up did not destroy it, and Melville proved to be the 
man for the crisis. 



504 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the people rejected the minister whom he nominated. This 
has been called the Great Charter of the Kirk. 

IV. The period of royal coercion and attempted conformity 
(1 592-1640). King James wished to be a royal theologian 
and an ecclesiastical Solomon. In 1590, at the general assem- 
bly, he ''praised God that he was born in such a place as to 
be king in such a kirk, the sincerest kirk in the world. . . . 
Stand to your purity, and exhort the people to do the same ; 
and I, forsooth, as long as I brook my life and crown, shall 
maintain the same against all deadly." When he went to 
London, in 1603, to reign over both England and Scotland, he 
lost his Presbyterianism, and soon after his Calvinism.* "He 
had more theology than would have sufficed for a divine, with 
scarcely enough religion for a Christian." In 1610 he secured 
some changes in the Scottish Church, over which he felt 
that he was sovereign. "No bishop, no king," was now his 
maxim. By unfair methods Parliament restored episcopacy ; 
and still later a general assembly at Perth was so managed as 
to pass the troublesome Five Articles, approving episcopal 
confirmation, kneeling at communion, observance of holidays 
(Sunday being one), private baptism, and private celebration 
of the Lord's Supper. To force all this upon the ScottisTi 
Church was now the effort. Soon there were in Scotland, with 
hardly a million of souls, the two archbishops, of St. Andrews 
and of Glasgow ; eleven bishops ; and nearly nine hundred 
parish ministers, few of whom wanted prelacy. 

The tabulating devices of James were enough to test all 
faith and patience ; but worse came with Charles I, and Laud, 
the English primate, j The bishops north of the Tweed had 
not been able to introduce the Anglican liturgy. A modified 
Prayer-book was now to be imposed on the Scots. The Sun- 
day for its inauguration was in July, 1637. At St. Giles, 



* James deserves credit for his patronage of learned men, such as George 
Buchanan and Isaac Casaubon. He and Christina of Sweden stand quite alone 
in this respect. 

t Their rigors increased after their visit to Scotland in 1633. A Scot so 
figured Will. Laud as to make 666, the number of the beast. His full name 
would have given 1667. Luther's name, and many others, have been thus 
manipulated. Robert Baillie (1640) gave this analysis of Laud's religion: 
"Twa parts Arminian, one Poperie, and scarse a fourth Protestant." Some 
called him The Cardinal. 



THE NATIONAL COVENANT. 505 

Edinburgh, the dean began to read it to an excited people, 
who felt that it brought doom to their liberties. The story is 
that an old woman, Jenny Geddes, rebuked him for saying 
mass, and hurled at him the stool on which she had sat. Mis- 
siles of all handy sorts were soon flying, and a riot occurred. 
"The kirk -doors of Edinburgh were locked, and no more 
preaching heard" there for a time. Elsewhere the Service 
Book was rejected with scorn. All Scotland was roused. 
Protests, petitions, twenty chief nobles, and more ministers, 
streamed into Edinburgh to let freedom loose in all Britain. 

A first great result was the National Covenant of 1638, 
framed by the two most eminent leaders, Sir Archibald John- 
stone (Lord Warriston), the wise lawyer of the kirk, and 
Alexander Henderson, the ablest and broadest theological 
Scotsman, a statesman in a country pulpit, "a. cabinet minister 
without office," not so much a writer of books as a maker of 
history, and an author of public documents which could talk 
plain English. We shall see him suggesting and directing 
other new and vast movements. The covenant was thought to 
have sanction in the Bible. * It was signed throughout Scot- 
land with a zest never yet forgotten. Any town council that 
stood off from it might look for a preaching committee with 
moral arguments, or the troops of Montrose with military per- 
suasions. Such measures were needed mainly in the North, 
where the Aberdeen doctors imitated Erasmus, complimented 
the wisdom of Laud, tried to enlist men in a counter-covenant 
which the king sanctioned, helped to create the ' ' Malignants, " 
but went out of sight in the first war for the National Cov- 
enant, f Their party was continued in the Cavaliers. 

This timely covenant enabled the general assembly of 1638 
to restore presbytery. It marks Scotland's second reformation. 
It called forth armies to enforce and defend it. It saved Scot- 
tish liberty. Under its banners the patriotic Scots resisted 
King Charles, rescued their fortresses from his garrisons, forced 

* The word covenant, so frequent in Hebrew history, was applied to this 
Scottish bond, which became a test of communion and a law to the conscience. 
Baillie said this covenant would "ever hang before the eye of God, the prime 
Covenanter." 

|At Aberdeen, the Meroz of the time, the covenanting soldiers assumed 
the blue ribbon, rather accidentally, and not with a symbolical intention. Much 
later came the phrase of Hudibras, "Presbyterian, true blue." 



506 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

him to call away his bishops, and, in 1640, swept down over 
the Tyne, and captured Newcastle. This event was a hinge in 
affairs. In arranging a peace, Henderson, Robert Baillie, and 
twelve other Scottish commissioners were in London for seven 
months. When they preached there the church was never 
empty. The Scots became known to the leading Puritans — 
such men as Pym, Holies, Hampden— and common interests 
of religion and liberty united them. Could they not frame 
a league?* 

Perhaps no clergy have ever been more exposed to the 
extremes of censure and laudation than the ministers of Scot- 
land from Melville to Rutherford (1661). They gained ascend- 
ency over the lords. They took public affairs very much in 
their own hands, and led Scotland through great crises. Their 
religion absorbed every thing ; their politics became religious 
their piety patriotic ; their nation was to them God's kingdom, 
and his moral government must be exemplified in their Church. 
They gave the pulpit a tremendous power in theology, morals, 
and politics, while they trained the people to search their Bibles 
and recite catechisms. They created a literature and a school of 
metaphysicians. In their presbyterial acts, sermons, pamphlets, 
books, we may "find things which we would rather not find." 
Yet if they need any apology we may quote their censor, Mr. 
Thomas Buckle, who was not in the habit of lauding the clergy 
anywhere. "They were the guardians of Scotch freedom, and 
they stood by their post. Where danger was, they were fore- 
most. By their sermons, by their conduct both public and 
private, by the proceedings of their assemblies, by their bold 



* Clarendon says that "when the whole English nation was solicitous to 
know what passed weekly in Germany and Poland and all other parts of Europe 
[during the earlier stages of the Thirty Years' War], no one ever inquired 
what was doing in Scotland, nor had that kingdom any mention in one page 
of any Gazette." But, says Masson, "Jenny Geddes's arm changed all that." 
Moreover, the Northerners seemed to think that the Scottish army was going 
south on a mission of reform. Mr. Row, in his Life of Robert Blair, tells how 
"there was nothing to be heard almost thi-ough the whole army but singing 
of psalms, and praying, or reading the Scriptures, in their tents and huts, . . . 
there being with the army many ministers." One Irish company "were all 
water-lappers and Bible-bearers." Near Newburn "old Mrs. Finnick came out 
and met them, and burst out, saying, 'And is it so that God will not come to 
England to reform abuses but with an army of twenty-two thousand men at 
his back?' " 



SCOTTISH CLERGY. 507 

and frequent attacks upon persons without regard to their 
rank ; nay, by the very insolence with which they treated their 
superiors, they stirred up the minds of men, woke them from 
their lethargy, formed them to habits of discussion, and excited 
that inquisitive and democratic spirit, which is the only effectual 
guarantee the people can ever possess against the tyranny of 
those who are set over them. This was the work of the 
Scotch clergy ; and all hail to them who did it. . . 
Herein they did a deed which should compensate for all their 
offenses, even were those offenses ten times as great. 
General causes made the people love their clergy, and made 
the clergy love liberty. As long as these two facts co-existed, 
the destiny of the nation was safe. It might be injured, 
insulted, and trampled upon. It might be harmed in va- 
rious ways ; but the greater the harm, the surer the rem- 
edy, because the higher the spirit of the country would be 
roused. . . . They were the champions of national inde- 
pendence. ... It was, therefore, on patriotic, as well as 
religious grounds, that the Scotch clergy, during the seven- 
teenth century, struggled against episcopacy."* 

The Parliament confided to the Church the founding and 
care of schools, but provided no funds to support them. The 
clergy tried to supply the defect. A presbytery taxed every 
plow of land for a school fund. In some parishes every health- 
ful child must attend school, or its parents be disciplined by 
the kirk ; the poor were offered education at the expense of 
the town. The reports of 1627 (Maitland Club) show either 
a sad decline or an old neglect. Of Mordington parish the 
report was, "There is ane greit necessatie for ane skule, for 
not ane of the paroche can reid nor wryt except the minister." 
The spelling reform was slow, even in England. The majority 
of the Scottish parishes had either a school ' ' deserted for 
want of means," or "no maintainance for it," or none at all. 
In 1633 the clergy, backed by Parliament, made an advance; 
schools began to be built and endowed. After 1688 the pro- 
prietors of every parish were required to furnish means of 
education to every child. 

* Buckle, Hist. Civilization in England. London, 1872; Vol. Ill, pp. 
113, 130, 194, et passim. 



508 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



Chapter XX. 

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH. 



1520-16G0. 



I. The Advance to Anglicanism. 

A general view of the entire movement will aid us in the 
history of its advances. In England the reformatory agencies 
were complicated. In the battle against Rome the human 
forces moved in two different lines, one led by a king, the 
other by spiritual reformers. Henry VIII lived in marriage with 
his deceased brother's wife, Catharine of Aragon, for sixteen 
years; he then applied in vain to the pope for a divorce (1527) ; 
he made his seven years' protest against papal infallibility in 
judgment, and ended it by wedding Anne Boleyn and renounc- 
ing allegiance to Rome. Thus he made the national Church 
independent. But this was not the genuine Reformation. 
Henry merely gave occasion for it in a peculiar mode and 
type. Without his divorce case it must have come in another 
way, even if he had fought it all his life, as he did when 
he dedicated to the pope his " Defence of the Seven Sac- 
raments against Martin Luther," and when the pope enti- 
tled him the Defender of the Faith (1521). He never really 
abandoned that faith. He contended for the essentials of it in 
the national Church. Thus he stood with the reformers against 
the pope, but against them in their radical principles. Hence 
there were within this anti-papal Church two parties — Anglo- 
Roman and Protestant — until the latter became supreme under 
Elizabeth. Then it was divided between Anglicans and Puri- 
tans. From the Puritans came the Presbyterians and Inde- 
pendents ; and the latter gave rise to various branches of 
dissent. Thus the history of the entire movement presents 
more intricacy of politics, a closer union of Church and state, 
and a larger development of new ideas in ecclesiasticism, than 
we find in any other country during that age. We may sim- 



CARDINAL WOLSEY. 509 

plify it by outlining the direct causes, the stronger agencies, 
the leading actors, the marked stages of progress, the origin 
of new systems, and the permanent results. 

I. Attempts at reform within the Anglo -Roman Church 
(1520-34). The scholars of the Oxford Circle were zealous 
for learning, conservative, happy in the king's favor, proud 
of Cardinal Wolsey as their representative, and generally 
content with his kind of reforms. He violated the prcemunire 
by acting as papal legate ; he sought to make the papacy 
supreme in England ; he perhaps rekindled in Henry's mind 
the wish for a divorce ; he aimed to be the director of European 
politics, if not pope, and he fell by his ambition, intrigue, and 
high notions of Church power. Yet he corrected some clerical 
abuses. He suppressed about twenty of the worst monas- 
teries, and with their wealth founded the school at Ipswich and 
Christ Church College at Oxford. He had vast educational 
schemes. He read Thomas Aquinas, and would have his 
theology preached in splendid cathedrals. He took delight in 
all the arts of the Renaissance. He was the protector rather 
than the persecutor of young preachers who began to speak 
boldly. He chose to burn heretical books rather than their 
readers, and that was no slight advance. 

Cambridge was sending out men more heroic, progressive, 
as fond of Erasmus but not so much afraid of Luther, whose 
writings crept in among them and were discussed at a house 
called the White Horse. They had sympathies for the poor 
Lollards who were hunted and burnt by scores. They saw no 
sensible reason for burning six men and one woman at Cov- 
entry because they taught their children the Creed, Lord's 
Prayer, and Ten Commandments in their native language. 
One charge against Wolsey was that he had prevented the 
bishops from searching the university for "errors touching the 
Lutheran sect," and thus "the said errors crept more abroad 
and took greater place." He thus spared Thomas Bilney, 
who was ' ' a great means of framing that university and draw- 
ing many to Christ," among whom was Hugh Latimer. And 
more, Wolsey transferred a dozen of these young men, whom 
Bilney was instructing in the Greek Testament, to his own college 
at Oxford, where one of the wardens said in 1528, "We were 
clear of heresy, without blot or suspicion, till they came." 




510 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

They met in each other's rooms and studied Paul's epistles. 
They had a whole library of heretical books written by various 
reformers on the Continent. They were routed by the perse- 
cutors. Out of Cambridge went the leading reformers. We 
must notice three of them, Tyndale, Latimer, and Cranmer, 
together with Cromwell. Each represented a great agency in 
the- Reformation.* 

William Tyndale, teaching and preaching near Bristol, found 
the people ignorant, and the priests oftener at the ale-houses than 
in the homes of the poor. He tells us that it was impossible 
to establish the lay people in any truth, unless the Scripture 
were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue. He 
also says that the clergy "expound the Scripture in many 
senses before the unlearned lay people and amaze them, when 
it hath but one simple literal sense, whose light the owls can not 
abide. . . . Which thing only moved me to translate the 
New Testament." One learned man said to him, "We were 
better be without God's laws than the pope's." He replied, " I 
defy the pope and all his laws. ... If God spare my 
life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to 
know more of the Scripture than thou dost." Here, then, was 
his motive. He w T ould translate the Greek Testament edited 
by Erasmus. His life became that of a hero, an exile, a 
wanderer, and he closed it in the persecutor's fire at Vilvorde, 
Holland, praying, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes" 
(1536). But he gave the English people the New Testament 
in their own language. Despite the efforts of men who were 
burning piles of copies in London and Oxford, groups of 
"Christian Brethren" were distributing it among the people. j 

Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the time, 
whose overflowing humor, logical tact, and telling anecdotes 
served to clinch the truths in porous memories, and who had 
something infinitely better than wit to dispense to a crowd 
which shed twenty tears for every smile, once said in a sermon 
before King Edward, " My father was a yeoman [of Leicester- 
shire], and had no lands of his own ; he tilled so much as kept 
half a dozen men. He had w r alk for a hundred sheep, and my 
mother milked thirty kine. . . . He kept me to school, or 

* Others were Stafford, Fryth, Coverdale, Bradford, Cox, Clark, Goodman, 
Barries, Becon, Parker, and Grindal. tNote I. 



HUGH LATIMER. 511 

else I had not been able to preach before the king's majesty 
now. . . . He kept hospitality for his poor neighbors, and 
some alms he gave to the poor." Hugh was then a bishop, 
ranking high among the magnates of the realm, but he thought 
a farmer as good as a baron, if he were honest before God. 
Neither college nor court made him less a man of the people. 
' ? To the last he retained his English heart, open, brave, and 
kindly, a yeoman in canonicals, a citizen in the pulpit. We 
love the dear old man, so loyal to his Master, so faithful to 
himself, so frank and unflinching to all around him." He was 
about forty years of age, and still at Cambridge (1526) when 
the Bishop of Ely came there to break up that nest of heretics 
at the White Horse. He created a great excitement, and 
forbade Latimer to preach longer in this university, or in his 
diocese. Wolsey interposed a second time in behalf of the 
Cambridge men. Citing Latimer before him he asked his name, 
and said, "You seem to be of good years, able to act wisely, 
and yet it is reported that you are much infected with this new 
fantastical doctrine of Luther, and such like heretics, that you 
do very much harm among the youth and other light-heads. 
Why doth the bishop mislike thy preachings ?" Latimer ex- 
plained how he had treated certain texts, and frankly answered 
all questions. Then the cardinal said, "If the Bishop of Ely 
can not abide such doctrine as you have here repeated, you 
shall have my license, and you shall preach it unto his beard, 
let him say what he will." The cardinal then gave him a 
license to preach throughout all England ! 

So Latimer was preaching at Cambridge again in a style 
that reminds us of John Knox. King Henry had him in Lon- 
don, and soon made him one of the royal chaplains. He was 
not offended when the preacher wrote to him pleading for the 
circulation of the Bible, and saying, "Gracious king, remember 
yourself; have pity on your soul. Think that the day is at 
hand when you shall give account of your office, and the blood 
you have shed with your sword." Latimer then took charge 
of a parish for a time, but was soon a preacher at large. In 
1530 Wolsey died under charges of high treason. The bish- 
ops began their terrible work. Bilney was one of the noble 
martyrs. Two men appeared at the critical hour, one to direct 
the affairs of state, the other those of the Church. 



512 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Thomas Cromwell, rising by merit and ambition, had been 
in the service of Wolsey, whose friend he was to the last. As 
a member of the House of Commons he sought to lift Parlia- 
ment above the power of the clergy. As a counselor of the 
king he drove another wedge between England and Rome when 
he boldly said, in effect: "The pope refuses your divorce. But 
why ask his consent ? Is he master in England ? Frederick 
the Wise and other German princes have thrown off the yoke 
of Rome. Imitate them. Become once more a king, and 
govern in concert with your Parliament. Proclaim yourself the 
head of the Church in England." This daring advice was to 
become a policy, and change the face of Church and state. Con- 
science had little to do with it, and respect for the clergy had 
still less. Cromwell would transfer the allegiance of the bishops 
from the pope to the king. He said to Henry, "The bishops 
make oath to obey you, but they make another oath to the 
pope; the second nullifies the first, and so the pope rules." 
How secure this change? Cromwell had his plan. In 1531, 
armed with royal authority, he went into the convocation of 
bishops and told them that they were in a very unhappy pre- 
dicament. ' ' You have taken oath to support the pope ; you 
have openly violated the law of praemunire by recognizing Car- 
dinal Wolsey as papal legate" — he had done the same thing, 
but times were changing — "and now your goods are liable to 
be forfeited to the king, and yourselves to be imprisoned." 
They were alarmed and helpless. They begged the royal par- 
don, and promised to pay into the king's treasury an enormous 
fine (about six hundred thousand dollars of our present money). 
But they were not yet free. The document which conveyed 
the pardon to them styled Henry the protector and supreme 
head of the Church and clergy, of England. This staggered 
them, for if they received it their oath to the pope was annulled. 
After earnest pleas and debates they agreed to the title qualified 
by the words "as far as by the law of Christ is lawful." But 
this required interpretation, and Parliament would settle it. This 
humiliating business over, the clergy returned to the persecu- 
tion of such heretics as Latimer and the shippers of Tyndale's 
Testament. 

Meanwhile Thomas Cranmer brought in his mode of solving 
the problem of the divorce. He was born in 1489, near Not- 



THOMAS CRANMER— SEMI-PROTESTANTISM. 513 

tingham. His father was an honest gentleman, and he fond of 
hunting, racing, and military sports. Leaving his horse, hawk, 
bow, and fish-lines, he went to Cambridge, where "linguistic 
barbarism still prevailed," and by his reserved, manly nature 
won the hearts of all about him. He married honorably, lost 
his wife, returned to his studies of Erasmus and Le Fevre, and 
when Luther's writings came he said, "I must know on which 
side the truth lies. I will seek it in God's Word." He studied 
the Bible for three years without a commentary or any human 
system of theology, and gained the name of the Scripturist. 
He became a doctor of divinity, professor, and university 
preacher. He said to his hearers, "Christ sends us to the 
Scriptures, and not to the Church." He was not a bold man, 
with radical measures of his own. He depended too much on 
the will and policy of the king, and had the ideas of his age in 
regard to the treatment of heretics and non-conformists. He 
was well adapted to save a cause in critical circumstances. 
When Gardiner and Fox were at their wit's end about the di- 
vorce business, he said to them, "You are not in the right 
path ; you are clinging to the opinions of the Church. There is 
a surer and shorter way to give peace to the king's conscience. 
The true question is this: What saith the Word of God? 
If God has declared such a marriage bad, the pope can not 
make it good. End these Roman negotiations." He suggested 
that the opinion of the universities be asked. This was done. 
Calvin, not yet at Geneva, was one of the men who decided 
against the marriage. But the universities were not agreed. 
At last Cranmer's opinion of Scripture, and Cromwell's idea 
of supremacy, prevailed. But Henry married Anne Boleyn 
even before the divorce was granted; conscience was not his 
real motive. Of her we think charitably, but her influence in 
the Reformation is apt to be exaggerated by those who esteem 
her as a martyr, not only to a tyrant's will, but to a pure and 
well-exemplified faith. 

II. Semi -Protestantism tinder Hemy VIII (1534-47). The 
king had revolted against the pope, and the clergy had been 
brought to terms. In 1534 the Parliament confirmed the acts 
and position of the king, as ■ ' the only supreme head in earth 
of the Church of England." The jurisdiction of the pope was 
abolished. Lollardism, learning, and partial reform had pre- 

33 



514 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

pared the nation to accept this state of affairs. Some men 
refused to take the oath of supremacy, chief of whom were 
Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More. They were executed in 
1535. This outrage upon liberty shocked Europe. It broke 
the alliance which Cromwell was forming with the German 
Protestants. "Upon the news of their death reaching Rome, 
the pope cited Henry to answer for it, and in case of refusal 
pronounced him excommunicate, placed his kingdom under an 
interdict, absolved his subjects from their allegiance, and com- 
manded the bishops and clergy to quit the country." But 
Henry went on his way, not intending any radical changes in 
the creed or ritual. The Church was still the old one, without 
a pope, but with a king at the head of it. Cranmer was made 
archbishop, and he had his part in the burning of John Fryth, 
who was the first of this class of reformers to deny transubstan- 
tiation; he also sanctioned the execution of several other mar- 
tyrs. The persecutors were checked and alarmed when Henry 
made Latimer Bishop of Worcester, and placed even more rad- 
ical men over important sees. Cromwell took the lead in the 
dissolution of nearly six hundred monasteries, both for their re- 
puted wickedness and their vast wealth. The shrine of Thomas 
a Becket, being rich and the resort of troops of pilgrims, was 
not too holy to be stripped and demolished. The confiscation 
of monastic property was too often associated with violence 
and rapine, and most of the wealth was used by the king, or 
bestowed upon his favorites. Ship-loads of books were sold on 
the Continent or destroyed. Acts of iconoclasm were frequent. 
The reformers began to rejoice in more positive methods of 
removing evils. "The Ten Articles" retained many errors, 
but they asserted that "the Holy Scriptures and the three 
creeds are the basis and summary of a true Christian faith; 
that penance consists of contrition, confession, and reformation, 
and is necessary to salvation; that justification is the remission 
of sins and reconciliation to God by the merits of Christ, and 
that good works follow after justification." The English Bible 
was to be placed in every church, for the people to read. ' ' The 
Institution of a Christian Man," with all its errors about the 
seven sacraments, prayers to saints, and the Ave Maria, was 
a book that bore some great truths to the people. But this 
doctrinal system was too Romish for Protestants, too Prot- 



HENRY VIII. 515 

estant for Romanists, and efforts to change it came from both 
parties. 

Henry was drifting in the right direction until the year 1539, 
when two events threw him into the hands of the Romanists. 

(1) He had sent Anne Boleyn* to the block, and now his next 
wife, Jane Seymour, was dead. Cromwell secured his betrothal 
to Anne of Cleves, hoping thus to ally England with the Prot- 
estant states of Germany. Politically and religiously it was a 
grand scheme against the emperor. It might have hastened 
and strengthened the reform in France, saved Southern Ger- 
many to Protestantism, and averted the Thirty Years' War by 
forming a mighty league against the pope and Spain. But 
when Henry met this princess he felt deceived and soon set her 
aside by divorce. His terrible vengeance fell upon Cromwell, 
whose execution was another of the many outrages which his- 
tory charges upon the king. Bishop Gardiner became the royal 
adviser, and with this astute politician the gentle Cranmer could 
do nothing; the Roman was too strong for the Protestant. 

(2) The mass had been assailed. The mass was the quintes- 
sence "of Romanism. It was not merely opposed by preachers, 
but one lawyer ridiculed it and it was put to scorn in ballads. 
This did more to shock the popular mind than the cries of ten 
thousand monks and nuns who had lost their convents, refused 
to enter others, and roamed at large creating insurrections and 
"the pilgrimage of grace." Henry no longer shielded the 
more advanced reformers. He led a powerful reaction. Cran- 
mer was barely spared, but he, like others, had to separate 
from his wife and children. Latimer and men of his stamp 
were forced out of their sees, for they would not subscribe the 
newly devised Six Articles. These had been indorsed by Par- 
liament. They re-established transubstantiation, communion in 
one kind, clerical celibacy, perpetuity 0/ monastic vows, private 
masses, and auricular confession. The persecution grew severer 
than ever before. Delicate women, like Anne Askew, were 
inhumanly tortured and burnt for denying the mass. 

In 1540 Cranmer began to regain his influence. The rigors 
were softened. No preacher could be charged with errors in a 

* Anne had favored the Protestants; her murderous removal was a blow to 
their cause. The circulation of the English Bible was the main stay and hope 
of the reform. 



5l6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

sermon if forty days had passed since its delivery. Milder 
punishments of supposed heresy were enacted. In 1543 Henry 
wedded his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr, a warm friend 
of the reformers. She wrote "The Lamentation of a Sinner," 
and had the commentary of Erasmus translated and placed in 
the churches. When the king died, in 1547, the English 
Church was Roman in appearance. "Excepting the litany in 
English, he left the ritual very much as he found it, as he did 
nearly the whole frame-work of religious belief. He, however, 
was, humanly speaking, the instrument whereby the three great 
barriers to improvement — the papacy, monasticism, and spiritual 
ignorance — were broken down. The course of national events 
during Henry's latter years, prepared the country for that 
Reformation which it subsequently fully embraced. Even the 
Six Articles, and other ebullitions of papal intolerance, had this 
tendency, by irritating the reforming party, and rendering its 
opponents additionally odious. Henry himself, however, was 
only an unintentional pioneer of the Reformation." 

3. Protestantism in tJie reign of Edward VI. (1 547—53). 
Henry had described Bishop Gardiner as a willful man not meet 
to be about his son, whom men of a quite thorough Protestant 
spirit had educated. Edward, now in his tenth year, was a 
prodigy, and his uncle, the Duke of Somerset, was not only 
the protector of the state, but also of the reforming Church. 
Ridley was soon at court preaching against images with the 
earnestness of a Zwingli. One of the first new measures was a 
royal order for pastors to dissuade their flocks from pilgrim- 
ages and to remove images, pictures, and other objects of 
superstition. Still it is said these men were not Calvinists. 
The protector complained that the iconoclasts went too far. 
He had some revolts to quell. For the new heads of govern- 
ment soon repealed the. Six Articles, put forth a Catechism and 
Book of Homilies, and the Book of Common Prayer ; the latter 
being a purifying revision of the Roman liturgy. All this was 
but legislative reform. Visitors were sent through the land to 
see it introduced in the parishes. It was quietly accepted in 
many places. Yet there was opposition enough to call for 
strict measures. It is now affirmed that these sweeping changes 
were carried through with the despotism, if not with the vigor, 
of Cromwell. Gardiner was sent to the Tower; four other prel- 



PAPAL REACTION. 517 

ates soon followed. Revolts in the country were put down by 
armies. The peasantry were in a sad condition ; ignorant, 
landless, without labor, almost starving, they believed the 
priests who told them that their troubles were caused by Lol- 
lardy and the greediness of the new nobility for the wealth of 
the monks and clergy. It is too true that "the upstart nobles" 
grew rich by such property, and none took larger spoils than 
Somerset. He sought to win the people and be the judge of 
their causes. This contributed to his fall and execution. His 
place was filled by Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, who 
married his son to the lady Jane Grey, the cousin of the king. 
The leading Protestants injured their cause by allowing this 
harmless and highly cultured princess to be regarded as the 
next heir to the crown. In the reaction she became a martyr, 
not simply to her purified faith, but to the ambition of her 
kindred. 

No doubt poverty and ignorance drove many into heretical 
notions and made them rebellious. Sounder views would have 
come by means of model farming, manufactures, common 
schools, and such "preaching of a lively sort," as Calvin recom- 
mended to Somerset. Latimer coming out of the prison where 
Henry had left him, old and heroic, declining a bishopric, 
preaching at large, drawing immense audiences, growing bolder 
against Romanism, did more for the Reform than all the forces 
that fought down insurrections. He laid bare the spoils and 
tyranny of the nobles, he drove home that word "restitution," 
he exposed the dishonesty of the traders, and the people looked 
to him as the advocate of their social rights. The liturgy was 
again revised with the aid of Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr, and 
John Knox. Of the latter Weston wrote: "A runagate Scot 
did take away the adoration of Christ in the sacrament, so much 
prevailed that one man's authority at that time." The efforts 
of Cranmer and Ridley culminated in the Forty-two Articles, 
afterwards reduced to Thirty-nine. 

4. The Papal Reaction (1553-58). On taking the throne 
Mary promised to force no one's religion, but as soon as she 
dared she began to restore Romanism with a zeal that delighted 
the pope. The entire system built up by Edward was suddenly 
overthrown. Gardiner, Bonner, and their sympathizers were 
released from the Tower, and into it were sent Latimer, Ridley, 



518 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

and Cranmer. Not until her marriage with Philip of Spain 
were the bloody acts of the tragedy begun. Care was taken to 
elect to Parliament members "of a wise, grave, and catholic 
sort." This body obtained the pope's absolution of the nation 
for its guilt of schism, and abolished all acts which made the 
sovereign the supreme head of the Church. The Latin service 
was restored. About one-half of the acting clergy were thrust 
out of their offices. Cardinal Pole, a branch of the royal house, 
had urged reform at the Council of Trent, had been threatened 
with impeachment for opposing Henry's divorce, and been in 
exile. He now ventured to return as papal legate, and was 
soon elected primate. Bishop Gardiner secured the passage of 
terrible edicts and laws. Bishop Bonner so applied them as to 
win the title of "the bloody." Yet his friends reported him as 
naturally a man of good humor. The fires of Smithfield and 
the ax at the Tower were in such active use during four years 
that nearly three hundred martyrs left their record of faith and 
triumph as one of painful glories of the English Reformation. 

When Rowland Taylor, Vicar of Hadleigh, was cheerfully 
leaving his home with the sheriff, the streets were full of weep- 
ing people, who said: "There goeth our good shepherd from 
us." When he was gazed upon by another crowd, near the 
stake, the kindly folk kept their tearful eyes upon his genial 
face and his long white beard, saying : ' ' God save thee, good 
Dr. Taylor! The Lord strengthen thee and help thee! The 
Holy Ghost comfort thee!" He was not allowed to speak to 
them. He kissed the stake, folded his hands, lifted his eyes 
to heaven, and waited for the consuming fire. But even this 
composed death was too merciful. His face was gashed, and 
head cleaved with a halberd. What were fagots to such men 
as these? Bonner asked a lad: "Do you think you can bear 
the fire?" The boy at once held his hand in the flame of a 
candle to show his power of endurance. The wife of John 
Rogers, with her ten children, could see her husband burnt at 
the stake, and still find some reason to bless God for a faith 
worthy of such witnesses. Bound to the stake with his friend, 
Latimer said, when the lighted fagot was applied: "Be of 
good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this 
day, by God's grace, light such a candle in England as, I trust, 
shall never be put out." 



MARTYRDOM OF CRANMER. 519 

Cranmer had been the decisive agent in the divorce against 
Catherine, thus branding the birth of her daughter Mary as 
illegitimate. This she could never forgive. But there were 
other motives. ' ' To burn the Primate of the English Church 
for heresy was to shut out meaner victims from all hope of 
escape." He was "more than any other man the representa- 
tive of the religious revolution which had passed over the land. 
The decisive change which had been given to the character of 
the Reformation under Edward was due wholly to Cranmer [?]. 
It was his voice that men heard and still hear in the accents 
of the English liturgy, which he compiled in the quiet retire- 
ment of Oxford." In an hour of weakness, and under the 
entreaties of friends he recanted. His enemies insisted that he 
should read his abjuration publicly in the Church of St. Mary. 
He evidently found out that he was to be burnt on that very 
day by his deceitful foes. He took his place before a hushed 
audience, and said : ' ' Now I come to the great thing that troubleth 
my conscience more than any other act of my life ; and that is 
the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth which I had 
thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save 
my life, if it might be. And forasmuch as my hand offended, 
writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished 
therefore; for, may I come to the fire, it shall be first burnt." 
After renouncing the pope, and all his false doctrine, his voice 
was drowned in the reproaches of the bystanders. Upon this 
he was hurried to the place already consecrated to the memory 
of Latimer and Ridley, amid the insults of the friars, who kept 
continually reminding him of his recantation. When the flames 
began to ascend, stretching forth his right hand he held it 
therein, ofttimes repeating, ' ' This unworthy right hand, this 
unworthy right hand!" so long as his voice would suffer him; 
and using the words of Stephen, "Lord Jesus, receive my 
spirit," in the greatness of the flame he gave up the ghost. 
Thus perished Cranmer, nobly redeeming in death the irresolu- 
tion that clouded the latter hours of his life. To his private 
worth even his enemies are compelled to bear testimony; while 
his readiness to forgive private injuries gave rise to the saying, 
"Do my lord of Canterbury an ill turn, and he will be your 
friend for life." 

Already bands of men, who were to be the human hope of 



520 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the religious restoration, had fled to Geneva, Zurich, Basle, 
Strasburg, and German cities. Among them were Bishops 
Coverdale and Bale, with such clergymen as Grindal, Sandys, 
Jewel ; Nowell, whose Catechism is famous ; Whittingham, 
whose Genevan ordination was afterwards acknowledged when 
he became an English bishop ; and John Foxe, the Church 
historian ; also Dean Cox, who prevented the English lit- 
urgy from being conformed to that of Geneva, at Frank- 
fort, where John Knox was ministering to the exiles. Many 
of these refugees were strongly inclined to the Calvinistic 
type of reform. They urged its adoption in their native land 
when they returned. 

Mary and Cardinal Pole died within a few hours of each 
other, in 1558, and their system fell with a crash. The people 
generally were sick of her reign. It had its political failures. 
The spirit of revolt was in the army. The country was sinking 
to a low point of defeat, disgrace, and wretchedness. Mary 
had overdone Romanism. Some one wrote to Bonner, "You 
have lost the hearts of twenty thousands that were rank papists 
within these twelve months." Humanity outgrows an intoler- 
ant religion. "Protestantism, burnt at home, and hurled into 
exile abroad, had become a fiercer thing," and when once more 
free it would carry all before it. Scarcely was Mary cold when 
bonfires were roaring in the streets of London, tables were 
spread in booths and stalls, and shouts rang, "Long live 
Queen Elizabeth!" 

V. The Reformation restored (1558). Elizabeth, the child 
of Anne Boleyn, was not a better classical scholar than Mary, 
but she knew more of modern literature and languages. She 
could say "No" to Philip and to French suitors, in their 
native tongues, with astounding emphasis. By never marrying, 
she kept herself more free from Continental politics. Her 
idea was to make England independent of all earthly powers, 
raise the nation to a proud eminence, and bestow prosperity 
and happiness upon her people. This policy was her religion, 
and the essence of her life. Government was an art; conscience 
often gave way to wily diplomacy, and the end was made to 
justify the means. One of her first acts was to inform the 
pope of her accession. He replied that she had no right to 
the throne, for England was in vassalage to him. "Great 



QUEEN ELIZABETH. 52 1 

Harry's daughter " recalled her minister instantly from the 
papal court, left papal insolence to discover its vanity, and 
soon was counted with Coligny and William the Silent in the 
trio of champions who resisted papal leagues, and, with divine 
help, saved Protestantism in Europe. 

By the will of the queen, and the votes of Parliament, the 
Church in England ceased to be Roman, and became Protest- 
ant. The old prelacy was continued in the new Anglicanism. 
Nowhere else was there a more national Church. The creed 
and liturgy were brought into the forms which have been 
scarcely changed since ; the sources and tests of doctrine, pol- 
ity, and discipline were to be the canonical Scriptures and the 
first four General Councils. The queen was not the visible 
head of the Church, but the supreme governor.* She insisted 
upon the obedience of the bishops to her will, and ' ' uniformity 
of public prayers and administration of sacraments, and other 
rites and ceremonies." Her political servants enforced the 
oath of supremacy. Her bishops and all the clergy must 
put in force the act of uniformity. But some of the men, 
who had been in the foreign Churches, came back from 
their exile with a love for the simpler modes of worship 
and for presbytery. The one form now prescribed was not 
to their taste nor their consciences. Through forty -four 
years her two strong purposes were, to subject the Church 
to its "governor," and to suppress all dissent; the first suc- 
ceeded, the second entirely failed. Young Puritanism was 
growing to manhood. "The Roman Catholics contested her 
right to the crown ; and despairing of the restoration of the 
ancient [mediaeval] faith, or even of toleration, during her life, 
they plotted against her throne. Hence their religion was asso- 
ciated with treason, and utterly proscribed ; its priests were 
banished ; its adherents constrained to attend the services of a 
Church which they spurned as schismatic and heretical." 
Anglicans claim that "the extreme tenets of Rome on the one 
side, and of Geneva on the other, were avoided." Strype thus 
describes her policy: "She would suppress the papistical 
religion, that it should not grow ; but would root out Puritan- 
ism, and the favorers thereof." 



*The title "Supreme Head" of the English Church was applied to Queen 
Anne, 1705, and to George I, 171 7. 



522 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Thus we find the Church of England reformed, established, 
and endowed. The law acknowledged no other. * In it there 
was no schism until about the year 1569, when Pope Pius V 
excommunicated the queen and her supporters, absolved her 
subjects from allegiance to her, and bestowed her dominions 
upon the King of Spain ! But England laughed at such im- 
pertinence. The papal thunders were silenced by the guns of 
her fleets and the storms of heaven, which sent the Spanish 
Armada to the bottom of the seas, and almost wrecked the 
Holy League. A few persons formed a Romish sect in Eng- 
land, and there were executions of Romanists for their con- 
structively treasonable plots. The Jesuits were banished ; their 
leader, Campion, was put to death. But they harbored at 
Douay and Louvain, in France. Their Douay Bible and 
Rheims Testament were English versions, and they made vig- 
orous efforts to circulate them in Britain. They could favor 
such translations when there was an end to serve. 

Since that time the Church of England has had only one 
suspension. Only once (1643) has the Book of Common 
Prayer been set aside, and prelacy been abolished. In order 
to trace the causes and events on some one line of facts, we 
take the following : The law enjoining uniformity brought Puri- 
tanism into activity ; this led to non-conformity ; part of the 
non-conformists became separatists ; but the majority sought to 
reconstruct the Anglican Church first on the Presbyterian basis, 
and then, along with it, on the Congregational basis, of doc- 
trine and polity. 

II. Puritanism from 1547 to 1642. 

John Hooper was the boldest of the early advocates of the 
Anglican system. ( ' It was his voice which first publicly pro- 
claimed the principles of religious freedom. He stood alone 
among the English Protestants of his age in denying the right 
of the state to interfere with religion." While the Six Articles 
were in force he was an exile among the Swiss reformers. Re- 
turning in the reign of Edward VI, he preached before the 
king ; and ' ' called for the restoration of the primitive Church, 
and demanded the abolition of all vestments, crosses, and altars. 
It is a wonder that such a man should have been asked to ac- 



*Note II. 



JOHN HOOPER. 523 

cept a bishopric; but, next to Latimer, he was the greatest 
and most popular preacher of his day ; and his zeal, not only 
for the Reformation, but for a further reformation, knew no 
bounds. And the king liked him. Hooper was a man pecul- 
iarly calculated to fascinate such an open, frank, and tender 
nature as that of Edward. . . . He had a generous human 
nature, a candid and truthful moral disposition. He loved his 
conscience more than any honors." He refused to take the 
oath of supremacy, though not disloyal to Edward, saying of 
all earthly powers: "It appertaineth nothing unto their office 
to make any law to govern the conscience of their subjects in 
religion. . . . The laws of the civil magistrate are not to 
be admitted in the Church." He told thousands of people that 
their consciences were bound only by the Word of God. He 
was imprisoned in the Fleet. Concessions were made to him ; 
he should wear the episcopal dress only on important occasions. 
In 155 1 he was consecrated Bishop of Gloucester, where, for 
four years, ' ' he visited and preached as bishop had never done 
in England before, and seldom, if ever, since, and so won the 
crown of a martyr. Such was the man who sounded the first 
note of that controversy which was afterwards to test the En- 
glish Church, and who laid the foundation of English Puri- 
tanism." 

He and Ridley secured the use of tables instead of altars in 
churches. They boldly exposed the immoralities of their age ; 
for lying, theft, perjury, profanity, and licentiousness demanded 
something more than the oath of supremacy, and the enforcing 
of clerical vestments. They and Latimer did their utmost to 
make faith productive of good works and holy lives, while the 
royal council were enforcing subscription to a creed, and impos- 
ing variant dresses upon the clergy. These reformers were 
martyrs in the reign of Mary. When she was gone, the Ma- 
rian exiles returned to act a prominent part in the Elizabethan 
reform, and secure a larger measure of purity in doctrine and 
ritual. But Elizabeth checked them. Her sharp rebukes fell 
upon Archbishop Parker, who had implored her minister, Cecil, 
"not to strain the cord too tightly." She scolded Grindal, 
who had favored the " prophesyings, " or meetings of the clergy 
for the discussion of theology and mutual enlightenment in 
Holy Scripture. They met a want among poor curates who 



524 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

saw that the best preacher drew the largest audience. They 
wished to acquire more Biblical knowledge and be trained in 
the delivery of sermons. The prophesyings became rapidly 
popular. Ten bishops joined Archbishop Grindal in making 
them effective. Rules were prepared for conducting them. 
Lord Bacon afterward said that they were the best means of 
training up preachers to handle the Word of God. They might 
have grown into theological schools, if they had pleased the 
queen. She urged that "it was good for the Church to have 
few preachers ; three or four were enough for a county ; the 
reading of the homilies to the people was enough." Arch- 
bishop Whitgift required suspected clergymen to take an oath 
to assure their conformity, and a court, or high commission, 
punished with great severity those who refused it. The queen 
insisted upon duties; the advanced reformers pleaded for rights. 
They denied that it was a duty to wear the clerical robes, use 
the sign of the cross in baptism, and the ring in marriage; 
kneel at the Lord's Supper, bow when the name of Jesus was 
read, or perform any rite which they regarded as purely human 
in its origin, and popish in its associations. But these ceremo- 
nies, which they resisted more strongly than even Calvin had 
advised, were lesser matters, and they sank to their level in the 
great controversy. Far weightier was the question of diocesan 
episcopacy. At bottom was the question whether divine or 
human law should be supreme. 

The chief leader of the Puritans, for a time, was Thomas 
Cartwright, in whom were many of the finest qualities of 
scholar and preacher. He was the first to give tangible form 
to the Presbyterianism within the English Church. He was a 
professor of divinity at Cambridge until removed by Whitgift, 
and often imprisoned. These two great and good men were 
champions in a controversy which agitated the whole land, and no 
small part of the Continent. They were both Calvinists in doc- 
trine ; and all candid historians admit that, in their time, Calvin- 
istic teaching generally prevailed in England.* Whitgift agreed 
with Cranmer and Hooker, that prelatic episcopacy was not of 



*This is shown by the fifty-four volumes of reprints by the Parker Society. 
Yet Arminianism was broached, in 1574, by Baron, a French refugee, and theo- 
logical professor at Cambridge. This led to a controversy. In 1595 William 
Whitaker, a theological professor there, took the leading part, with Whitgift 



SEPARATISTS. 525 

divine appointment and right, but of useful policy, and held 
that Christ had left the external polity of the Church an open 
question. Cartwright advocated the exclusive and divine au- 
thority of the presbyterial system ; he and his followers thought 
that the civil magistrates should exercise power in favor of a 
scriptural religion. They did not understand the later principle 
of toleration. But there could be no agreement, nor concession, 
so long as the crown enforced the Anglican system and ritual. 
The controversy took a new turn, in 1588, when Bancroft 
asserted the divine right of episcopacy, and it came to be her- 
esy to deny the doctrine. He may be called the father of 
Anglican High-churchism. 

Independent congregations had already been attempted in 
London, one in 1555, one by Richard Fitz, in 1568, and others 
by Robert Browne. In 1580 Sir Walter Raleigh spoke of the 
Brownists as thousands in number. But these and the Baptists 
were freely classed with the Anabaptists. Henry Barrowe 
opposed every form of nationalism in a Church, and urged sep- 
aration from the Establishment. He and some others were 
put to death by Whitgift's court. Barrowe, Greenwood, and 
John Penry, "the noblest martyrs of independency," were not 
opposed to the coercive power of civil rulers in matters of re- 
ligion, if that power were on their side. The Baptists, scarcely 
then organized, claim to have been ' ' the proto-evangelists of the 
voluntary principle." They claimed such rights of conscience 
as Hooper had asserted. The first Separatists became pilgrims 
to Holland, and elsewhere. But most of the Puritans opposed 
separation from the national Church. They dreaded schism. 
They preferred to be non-conformists, and strive to bring the 
whole Church over to their views. It is easy now to admire 
the Independent, who refuses to conform and secedes from the 
Church — goes out like a man, and fights his battle on an out- 
side field ; but the law then punished the seceder. The one 
thing for a man to do, for his own safety, was to conform, stay 
in the Church and be quiet. Fines were laid upon all health 

and other divines, in framing the nine Lambeth Articles, which assert strongly 
the Five Points of Calvinism. Fuller says that they expressed " the general 
and received doctrine of England in that age." But the queen would not sanc- 
tion them. In 1604 the Puritans failed to get them inserted authoritatively in 
the Book of Articles. 



526 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ful men and women who absented themselves from ' ' church, 
chapel, or any other place where common-prayer is said accord- 
ing to the Act of Uniformity." It is no wonder that some men 
went to an extreme of simplicity, and imputed sin to a written 
prayer, a painted window, an instrument of music, and a secu- 
lar smile. But it is a wonder that, in a time of popular igno- 
rance and need of preaching, when some families lived a dozen 
miles from a legalized chapel, hanging should be due to such 
men as John Penry, the Welsh evangelist, whose learning 
matched him with the four bishops of Wales, and piety exalted 
him far above its idle and vicious clergy ; and who pleaded on 
his trial, ' ' I have no office in that poor congregation ; as for 
our meeting in woods, or anywhere else, we have the examples 
of our Savior, and of his Church and servants in all ages, for 
our warrant. . . . We know that meeting in woods, in 
caves and mountains, is a part of the cross and baseness of the 
Gospel, whereat it is easy for the natural man to stumble, but 
we are partly partakers of this mean estate for the Lord's 
sacred verity." His mantle fell upon Vavasor Powell, the Bap- 
tist preacher, whose successes were marvelous. 

The Puritans began to differentiate their systems. Not 
reckoning the germinating sects whose ideas were extravagant, 
nor the mere politicians, we find four classes of Puritans, the 
first three still within the national Church, (i) Certain Angli- 
cans, who were non-conformists as to questionable rites and 
ceremonies. Miles Coverdale, a translator of the Bible, the 
Bishop of Exeter until Mary's reign, declined to resume the 
episcopal office. He became a popular pastor, but was obliged 
to leave his flock on account of his non-conformity. The 
good old man dared not make public the times and places 
of his preaching. He died in 1568, the last of the bishops 
who founded the Church of England. A middle party could 
then do nothing. (2) The Presbyterians, of whom fifteen min- 
isters, such as Cartwright and Walter Travers and a few lay- 
men, met in 1572, and formed the Order of Wandsworth, the 
name being taken from the quiet village of that name near 
London. This has been called the First Presbytery in England, 
but these men met as presbyters of the national Church, and 
not as separatists. They wished to reform and reconstruct the 
Anglican Church, or presbyterianize it, by gradually introduc- 



THE INDEPENDENTS. 527 

ing a mode of worship and discipline freed from mediaeval 
rites. Their directory for public worship, drawn up by Cart- 
wright, to be used as opportunity offered, soon proved ac- 
ceptable to about five hundred parish Churches and pastors, 
when the queen's measures drove it into secluded corners. 
Two rival systems met in the pulpit of the Temple, London 
(1585—7), when Richard Hooker was sent to re-enforce Walter 
Travers in the lectureship. In the morning one preached con- 
formity ; in the evening the other set forth Puritanism ; one 
affirmed, the other refuted, until Hooker became annoyed, and 
Travers was removed to Trinity College, Dublin. Both were 
scholars and gentlemen. One wrote the famous " Ecclesiastical 
Polity," which the moderate Anglicans have ever since honored 
as the noblest exponent of their system ; the other wrote his 
"Ecclesiastical Discipline," which was thrice published and 
thrice destroyed by the ruling powers. English Presbyterianism 
lay in hopeless doom fifty years. It was sorely disappointed 
in James I, and persecuted by Laud. But, in 1638, it was 
electrified "by the National Covenant of the Scots. It sprang 
to life in hundreds of parish ministers, and in the English 
Commoners who sent into the Long Parliament a majority of 
Presbyterians. 

(3) The Independents, who were growing more pronounced 
in their opposition to both prelacy and presbytery. They were 
not willing to follow Robert Browne in his scheme of separa- 
tion. They were non-conformists, like the Presbyterians, only 
striving for a congregational polity in the national Church. 
They united with the Presbyterians in the Millenary Petition to 
King James (1603-25), representing one thousand non-conform- 
ist ministers who "groaned under the burden of human rites 
and ceremonies," and asked for a more godly ministry, and 
purer doctrine. This brought the Hampton court conference, 
in 1604, where James discarded the Kirk of Scotland, which 
he had promised to maintain against all deadly foes. The Pu- 
ritans were roughly handled by him. He felt the divine right 
of kingship, and said, "I will have one doctrine, one discipline, 
one religion in substance and ceremony. I will make them 
conform, or harry them out of the land, or else do worse." 
Whitgift said that "His Majesty undoubtedly spake by the 
special assistance of God's Spirit!" Such flatterers would tell 



528 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

him that he was divinely inspired in detecting the Gunpowder 
Plot (1605), but mere human insight into the Spanish League 
was enough to have kept him from sending Walter Raleigh to 
the block (161 8), to please the monarch who claimed the sway 
over the Americas. Sully called him ' ' the wisest fool in Chris- 
tendom." His son-in-law, Frederick, deep in the Thirty Years' 
War,* may have had a similar opinion. Yet it was well for 
England that her king did not involve her in the vast German 
ruin. If he was cowardly in military affairs, he felt brave in 
the hour when he was browbeating the Puritans. It was alto- 
gether a human spirit that moved him. Thenceforth there was 
no truce in the battle of forty-four years between the royal will 
and the Puritan conscience. The king's wisdom was seen in 
the new version of the Bible, proposed in the Hampton Con- 
ference by Dr. Edward Reynolds, a moderate Puritan, and an 
oracle in Biblical lore. It was a revision rather than a new 
version. It was authorized in 161 1 by King James, whose part 
in this noble work may cause us to think gratefully of him, 
despite his vanity in theology, his absurdities in kingcraft, his 
profane oaths, and his drunkenness. We are more grateful to 
far better men, for Puritans and Churchmen sat down together 
before that truth which banishes partisan strifes, did honor to 
previous translators, especially the martyred Tyndale, and gave 
an English Bible to the whole English race of every creed 
and clime. In all the wide realms of Britain and her children 
it has been the ark of English speech, the bond of unity in the 
empire of language and the guardian angel of Saxon thought 
in father-land, and colonies, and independent states. ' ' There is 
not a Protestant [of English speech] with one spark of relig- 
iousness about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his 
Saxon Bible." Older versions had given fire to the poetry of 
Shakspeare, and the new was not quite to the taste of Lord 
Bacon. It had the merit of being free from partisan comments. 
It had a long race with the Genevan version. Scots and Puri- 
tans, while bending to the literary law of the "survival of the 
fittest," still complained that they "could not see into the 
sense of Scripture, for lack of the spectacles of those Genevan 
annotations." 

(4) The Separatists. The Brownists failed. In 1596 Henry 

*Note IN. 



chart.es i. 529 

Ainsworth was one of the exiles who founded an independent 
Church in a lane of Amsterdam, Holland, and published a 
confession of faith, not forgetting to say that it was the official 
duty of civil rulers to " suppress and root out, by their 
authority, all false ministries, voluntary religions^ and counter- 
feit worship." They had brethren in England who did not 
wish to be rooted out. In the shire of Nottingham the fol- 
lowers of such laymen as William Brewster and William Brad- 
ford organized a few Churches on a congregational basis. They 
had serious difficulty both in living in England and getting out 
of it. Some of them escaped to Holland, and founded a 
Church at Leyden, having as their pastor John Robinson, the 
scholar, deep thinker, and modest inquirer, who said, "I am 
verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth 
out of his holy Word.* For my part, I can not sufficiently 
bewail the condition of those reformed Churches which are 
come to a period in religion and will go, at present, no further 
than the instruments [leaders] of their reformation." Here was 
the mother Church of the Pilgrims, who received his blessing 
and sailed in the Mayflower for New England (1620), which 
became the main refuge of non-conforming Independents and 
Separatists. 

The Puritans won political ascendency in the reign of 
Charles I (1625-47). He was crowned at the age of twenty- 
three. Pie had scholarship and exquisite taste in the fine arts. 
His wife, Henrietta, was a more intense Romanist than her 
father, Henry IV of France. "I will have no drunkards in 
my bedchamber," said he; and he brought the royal court into 
decency. The divine right of kings and the divine right of 
the king's bishops were prime articles in his creed and motives 
of oppression. The vicious distinction between a public and a 
private conscience made him a deceiver of the people. He 
was ruined by a Jesuit casuistry and wretched sophisms which 
excused a falsehood. His word was not a bond. "He lied 
on system ; other Stuarts liked lying, but he approved of it, 
and the vice cost him his crown and his life." He ruled for 
nearly twelve years without a Parliament. "Out of a pious 
care for the service of God" he republished the "Book of 
Sports," which his father had issued to counteract Dr. Bound's 

*Only on the Calvinistic path did he expect any new light. 

34 



530 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Puritan work on the Sabbath. The royal license now was, 
"that after the end of divine service our good people be not 
disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawful recreation, 
such as dancing, either men or women, archery for men, leap- 
ing, vaulting. . . . May- games, Whitsun-ales, Morris- 
dances, and the setting up of May-poles and other sports 
therewith used. . . . We bar from this benefit and liberty 
all such known recusants as will abstain from coming to 
Church or divine service, being therefore unworthy of any law- 
ful recreation." Thus the sports were forbidden to Puritans!* 
The royal will found ready executors in William Laud and 
Sir Thomas Wentworth (Earl of Strafford) ; one directed the 
Church, the other began with reforms in the state, but ended 
with rigors intolerable. Both worked hand in hand for the 
absolutism of the crown. Wentworth's severest tyranny, along 
with some of his best reforms, was in Ireland. As a bishop and 
as primate (1633-45) Laud brought into his Church the spirit 
which disowns the title of Protestant. Eager for "the unity 
of dismembered Christendom," he seemed to think that Rome 
would be the true center of it, if the papacy were reduced to a 
patriarchy. He refused a cardinal's hat so haltingly that the 
offer was renewed. He loved the title of " Most Holy Father." 
He favored clerical celibacy by example and precept. He 
turned out a few Jesuit school-masters and burnt a book in 
which were prayers to "the Blessed Virgin Mary," but pru- 
dent Romanists were not annoyed. His watchwords were 
ritualism and uniformity of ceremonies. If the Puritans ad- 
dressed the intellect, he would reach the heart though the eye. 
He externalized religion. He was an actor in the chancel. He 
magnified the altar above the pulpit. He was a sacramenta- 
rian. The son of a clothier, he had an inborn love of clerical 



*In contrast with the "Book of Sports" the Scots had a rule which had 
come down from Knox's First Book of Discipline: "The Sabbath must be kept 
strictly in all towns both forenoon and afternoon, for hearing of the Word ; at 
afternoon upon the Sabbath the Catechism shall be taught, the children exam- 
ined, and the baptism administered." Such was the Scottish Sabbath-school in 
that age. Laud suspended some clergymen for not reading the "Book of 
Sports" (a mere pamphlet) in their pulpits. One parson read it, and then read 
the fourth Commandment, and said, "This is God's law; that is man's injunc- 
tion ; choose between them." Fuller tells of the "grief and distraction" which 
the sports caused in honest men's hearts. It is little wonder that the Puritans 
went to an extreme of rigor in Sabbath-keeping. 



ARCHBISHOP LAUD. 53 1 

robes, surplices, and attitudes. He gave prominence to im- 
ages, candles, crucifixes. "If he was a fool, he was honest." 
He adhered to his few principles with unflinching courage. No 
Stuart perfidy in him, for he was too conscientious ever to 
promise liberty of conscience to a non-conformist. Without 
Wolsey's genius, he was like the great cardinal in political 
ambition, and in a liberal patronage of art, literature, and 
charities. He repaired cathedrals. He founded an almshouse 
in his native Reading. With vast pains and cost he added 
thirteen hundred valuable manuscripts to the new Bodleian 
library. He made endowments for Oriental studies at Oxford, 
his alma mater. He established a Greek press at London. 
But the Puritan, who got a bursary, or continuous alms, was 
one whom favors might convert. Laud allowed a canonry to 
"the ever memorable John Hales;" but if Sir John bade 
Calvin good-night at Dort, he might possibly bid Arminius 
good-morning at Windsor. In his narrower theology Laud 
went beyond Arminius, and yet he was ready to mark any 
strict conformist as sufficiently orthodox* for royal favors. 

Laud was chief policeman and detective of the Puritans. 
Spies in their chapels, conclaves, and even private houses, 
reported their defects. Meeting-houses were closed, and the 
key of knowledge lodged with the nearest rectors. The con- 
gregations of Dutch and Huguenot refugees must conform or 
disband. The Puritans must not print nor import their favorite 
books, especially the Genevan Bible. They must have no 
door of escape. Shiploads of them were prevented from sail- 
ing to New England. Thus he anticipated Louis XIV in the 
most refined cruelty of his policy. If only a few men were 
severely punished, the methods were enough to irritate and 
rouse, but not sufficient to quell, a race of heroes. To crop 
the ears of Dr. Alexander Leighton, a Scot, and whip, brand, 
and set him in the pillory, and keep him in prison nearly 
twelve years, was not the best way to answer "Zion's Plea 
against Prelacy," nor to make his more famous son, Robert, a 

*In Laud's register, names marked O were orthodox in dress, liturgy, and 
loyalty ; those marked P were Puritans, unworthy of favors. When Bishop 
Morley was asked what the Arminians held, he replied, "The best bishoprics 
and deaneries in England." Still Bishops Davenant, Carlton, Joseph Hall, and 
Ussher led a school of Calvinists, and had theological sympathies with the 
Puritans. 



532 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

high -churchman. Harsher treatment of rough, abusive, brave 
Presbyterian Prynne did not annihilate his folios. People 
who still had ears uncropped, began to hear what such crying 
events meant, and meditate thereon. 

In 1640 the Long Parliament began its record of thirteen 
years with a mighty and Puritan will. The House of Com- 
mons held the sway. In it John Pym soon struck the decisive 
blow by impeaching Wentworth for high treason, as ''the 
greatest enemy to the liberties of his country." By this mas- 
ter-stroke the Commoner became the leader, the "King Pym" 
of Parliament. The next month (December) Laud was sent 
to join his friend in the Tower for the same crime. One of 
these prisoners was executed the next May; the other in 1645, 
when a release of the aged prelate would scarcely have imper- 
iled liberty. But the majority of Parliament thought of jus- 
tice, and not policy. They made "Laud a martyr, and gave 
occasion to the reaction which canonized him." Meanwhile, 
the victims of these oppressors had been released from long 
imprisonments. Dr. Leighton was carried out feeble and sight- 
less. Other less worthy men were hailed with louder shouts by 
the advocates of a free press. Parliament, not always just and 
merciful, was trying to save England by bringing the king to 
the terms of the constitution. Unwilling to submit, he was 
trying to save himself and his prerogatives. The condition of 
the Church and events in Ireland made religion the burning 
question of the time. The idea of uniformity did not perish 
with the removal of Laud. It rather grew stronger. It en- 
listed more advocates. But it must find a new basis, and 
that was earnestly sought by moderate Anglicans, Puritans, 
and Scots.* 

III. The Reformed Church of Ireland. 

The Roman Church in Ireland, completely papalized, had 
followed the downward course of Christendom, and sunk 

*The age showed a passion for uniformity. " It tried to uniformalize men's 
heads by dressing them out in full-bottomed wigs ; and trees, by cutting them 
into regular shapes. Yet even trees, if they have any life, disregard the Act 
of Uniformity." (C. J. Hare.) The Quakers, by conscientiously adhering to 
the common dress of the people, came to have a uniform fashion. Beneath all 
this was the vice of making indifferent things a matter of conscience. This 
was common to the best religious bodies of that period, until real liberty of 
conscience began to assert itself. 



IRELAND IN TRANSITION. 533 

extremely low in servility, ignorance, superstition, and sorrow. 
She gave birth to no efficient reformer. The first reformatory, 
efforts were mechanical. Henry VIII wished to wrest Ireland 
from the pope. In 1535 he sent over George Brown as Arch- 
bishop of Dublin, an honest man, who had been the provincial 
of the Augustinian monks in England, but who was now a 
follower of Luther. Henry's supremacy was acknowledged by 
the Irish Parliament. Nearly four hundred convents were dis- 
solved, and their revenues turned into the king's treasury. 
The images were removed from certain churches. There was 
scarcely any spiritual reformation. 

In Edward's reign John Bale and four other bishops were 
sent to introduce the English Bible and liturgy, but these were 
not translated into the Irish language. Most of their work was 
undone by Mary. The first efforts of Elizabeth were little 
more than failures, for the people were ruled rather than 
taught. She restored the Anglican system there, and sent 
over a press and Irish types, hoping "that God in mercy would 
raise up some one to translate the New Testament." The 
hope grew bright in 1573, when Bishop Walsh and his assist- 
ants began the work with zeal, but he was mortally wounded 
by a wretch who had been disciplined for a gross crime. 
William O'Donel completed it, and in 1602 published the New 
Testament in Irish. The light gleamed, but the surrounding 
darkness was thick and full of blackest deeds. Riot, rebellion, 
war, anarchy, took their course until the northern province was 
almost a desert. 

The savage chieftains of Ulster, furious for a liberty which 
they knew not how to use, were conquered and deprived of 
their lands. The province was opened to settlers. One design 
was to break up clanship. Many English and more Scots went 
over and formed the Plantation of Ulster. They were the main 
basis of the really Protestant churches of Ireland. Great 
troubles grew out of the differences in race, language, and 
religion, and the strifes for estates and offices. Yet the settlers 
did much to introduce better farming, manufactures, and com- 
forts in homes. The northern natives began to be more quiet 
and thrifty. English law was enforced, crime was decreasing, 
and the strings of the Irish harp were tuning to a new civiliza- 
tion. But who should handle the harp? The Protestants were 



534 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

far in the minority; by birth they differed in race, country, and 
religion, and all the powers of Romanism and the Irish chief- 
tains were against them. In the deep problem were three 
questions: how to unite or comprehend English and Scots in 
the Anglo-Irish Church; how to secure favor for them, and 
missionary progress among the native people ; and how to main- 
tain over all politically a Protestant government. The solution 
of the first was attempted by Ussher; the second by Bedell; 
the third by the new model of Parliament (1613), and by Went- 
worth with his Thorough Scheme.* 

James Ussher was born in Dublin, 1 581 ; taught to read 
by two blind aunts who could recite nearly the whole Bible ; at 
eighteen the victor in debate with an acute Jesuit; and at 
twenty-one a preacher and lecturer on theology in the new 
University of Dublin, which had reared him in the highest 
scholarship. He became a master and an author in the wide 
domain of history and patristic lore. To unify, reform, and ele- 
vate the Protestant clergy in Ireland was his noble effort. They 
needed it, if we may believe half that is reported concerning 
their dissolute lives. In the diocese of Kilmore ' ' both parsons 
and vicars did appear to be poor, ragged, ignorant creatures," 
and one-third of them lounging somewhere away from their 
parishes. So elsewhere. In large rural districts the Protestants 
claimed churches without pastors, long without any services, 
and going to ruin or utterly desolate. They are reckoned by 
hundreds. 

Ussher proposed a scheme of Comprehension, by which all 
the Scots and Anglicans might unite in one Church. But he 
was too nearly a Presbyterian to suit the Anglicans, too strong 
a royalist to please the English republicans, and portions of the 
English liturgy were not acceptable to the Scots. He was not 
a skillful administrator — certainly not of the Laudian type. 
The scheme promised well in Ireland, but it failed across the 



* In this first actual Irish Parliament there were present one hundred and 
twenty-five Protestants and one hundred and one Romanists. A representa- 
tion, according to their constituencies, would have given the Romanists a vast 
majority. 

Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, meant, by his scheme of Thorough, to make 
Charles I the absolute monarch of the British Isles, so that all estates, personal 
liberties, courts of law, universities, churches, parliaments, and offices, would be 
fully under his control. He would be the Richelieu of absolutism in Britain. 



THE REFORMING NOBILITY. 535 

channel. It recognized ordination by presbyters, and bishops 
as superintendents, not as prelates. In 161 5 he drew up the 
notable Irish Articles, which were adopted by the first reformed 
convocation, and authorized by the chief officers of the realm. 
They were so Calvinistic as to do service in the Westminster 
Assembly. For twenty years they were the creed of the Anglo- 
Irish Church.* 

An Irishman said of the clergy sent over by James I: "The 
king's priests are as bad as those of the pope." Not all were 
so worthless. Unwittingly he drove over better ministers from 
the Scottish kirk, which he had praised and then persecuted. 
Ussher, as bishop of Meath (1620-5), and then primate of the 
Anglo-Irish Church, favored them and gave them charges as 
pastors or missionaries. They readily adopted his Articles. 
They were not required to use the entire liturgy. Among 
them were Robert Blair, who had left a professorship in Glas- 
gow, and John Livingstone, who had been thrust out of a 
Scottish pastorate. They were leaders in the most remarkable 
spiritual revival that Protestantism had yet known. It began 
about 1623, and widely extended through Ulster. People went 
forty miles to hear them. Some prominent Irishmen were con- 
verted. In Blair's autobiography he says: "This blessed work 
of conversion was of several years' continuance. . . . Preach- 
ing and praying were so pleasant in those days, and hearers so 
eager and greedy, that no day was long enough, nor any room 
great enough, to answer our strong desires and large expecta- 
tions." But these efficient preachers were threatened. Primate 
Ussher, who knew of mischief plotted at London against him- 
self, said to Blair: "It would break my heart if your successful 
ministry in the North were marred. They [at London] think 
to cause me to stretch out my hand against you ; but all the 
world shall never move me to do so." The threat came from 
Laud. In tedious ways bishops Echlin and Bramhall deposed 
five of them. They and several other ministers, with one 
hundred and forty emigrants, took the Eagle Wing for New 
England, 1636; but their little ship was beaten back by storms 



* "The intellect of Ireland," says Dr. Killen, "now awoke from the slum- 
ber of ages, and exhibited abundant proofs of its versatility and vigor." Edu- 
cated Romanists, some of them trained abroad in Jesuit seminaries, proved skillful 
in controversial theology and history. 



536 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

from mid ocean. Some of the preachers held services in Irish 
barns and farm-houses, waiting for the political sky to clear; 
others settled in the land of their fathers, and thus escaped 
the coming massacre. 

Livingstone had already assisted in a similar revival in West- 
ern Scotland. In 1630 he administered the Lord's Supper to 
a crowd in the kirk of Shotts, near Glasgow. On Monday he 
reluctantly preached, and to his sermon, as a means, nearly five 
hundred souls ascribed their conversion. David Dickson found 
the work wonderful at Stewarton and Irvine. Fleming says 
that, "like a spreading moor-burn, the power of godliness did 
advance from one place to another, which put a marvelous 
lustre on those parts of the country, the savor whereof brought 
many from other parts of the land to see its truth." 

Ussher had greatly rejoiced in one co-laborer. In 1629 
William Bedell, a native of Essex, a traveler, fine scholar, and 
saintly preacher, in his sixtieth year, became bishop of Kilmore 
and Ardagh. He taught ignorant priests how to use their own 
language in Church services. His catechism, prayers, and sum- 
maries of Scripture, in Irish, were widely circulated. His Irish 
version of the Old Testament was kept from the press by the 
policy of Laud. About fifty years later it was published at the 
expense of the eminent Robert Boyle. Bedell had the key to 
the Irish heart. But his good work was checked by Went- 
worth's tyranny in ousting land-owners whose titles were defect- 
ive, and enforcing the black oath on Protestant non-conformists. 
So violent was the feeling against the royalists, that Ussher's 
house was sacked by the Irish in 1640, and he retired to Eng- 
land, where he spent the remaining sixteen years of his life in 
preaching and authorship. 

Early in October, 1641, Ireland seemed to be quiet. Went- 
worth had been executed. Laud was in prison. To his Angli- 
canism the Protestants, happily or hopelessly, thought they 
must all come at last.* But suddenly, on the eve of October 
23d, "being St. Ignatius Loyola's day," they were under a 



*The Anglo-Irish Church had then four archbishops and about sixteen 
bishops. The Scotch and English Protestants were about two hundred and 
twenty thousand ; Irish Romanists probably one million two hundred and forty 
thousand. It was estimated that during 1641-52 fully six hundred thousand 
people in Ireland perished by massacres, war, pestilence, and famine. 



IRISH MASSACRE. 537 

massacre which ranks with the Sicilian Vespers and the St. 
Bartholomew. Hallam thinks that "the primary causes of it 
are to be found in the two great sins of the English government: 
in the penal laws as to religion . . . and in the systematic 
iniquity which despoiled the people of their possessions." It 
may have been plotted by exiled Irishmen in Spain with the 
help of the Jesuits. The pope thought it a "well-arranged 
movement by the prelates and other clergy." The leaders in 
it were Irish chieftains. The swift rumors of it had a rousing 
effect on Scots and Puritans, as they heard that bands of papists 
were roving about sacking and burning houses of Protestants, 
stripping them of all clothing, chasing them over the moors, 
and denied every mercy by those who believed the priests 
when they declared it to be a mortal sin to give relief to the 
English. Thirty preachers are reported to have been murdered 
in one district, and when the rebels found a Bible they said: 
"This book has bred all the quarrel." The numbers slain, or 
caused to perish, are reckoned by Warner, a Protestant, at from 
eight thousand to twelve thousand; others estimate four times 
those figures, and some twelve times as many. 

Amid all the fury the reddest hand was slow to strike the 
good bishop Bedell. The old man of seventy was engaged by 
the savage chieftains to send to the government a statement of 
their grievances, some of which were real and intolerable. 
Refugees filled his house, barn, church, and even the church- 
yard. His very fences made his premises a sanctuary for nearly 
two months. Then the fiercer rebels demanded that he should 
drive away the Protestants, whom he fed. He refused. They 
cast him into prison for three weeks. An exchange of pris- 
oners brought his release. He soon died, in 1642, and the 
Irish chieftains followed him to his grave with their troops. 
They fired a volley of shot over it and said in Latin: "May 
the last of the English rest in peace." A priest is reported as 
exclaiming: "Would to God that my soul were with Bedell!" 

The first reformed presbytery in Ireland was organized in 
1642, at Carrickfergus, by the chaplains of the Scotch troops, 
who came over to defend the Protestants. It soon had twenty 
ministers and Churches, with Belfast as a stronghold, with the 
Scottish Confession and Covenant of 1638, and a rapid increase 
by means of the Solemn League. 



538 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



NOTES. 

I. English Versions of the Bible. Tyndale's New Testament was printed 
in 1526. Coverdale's entire Bible, 1535; this was reproduced as Matthew's 
Bible, 1537, and as Taverner's Bible, 1539. It included Tyndale's version. 
It was revised and issued as Cranmer's Bible, or the Great Bible. Every 
parish was enjoined by law to have a copy of it. The Genevan Bible was 
produced by Whittingham (who had married Calvin's sister-in-law there), 
Knox, and other exiles, at Geneva, 1560. The authorized English version 
of 161 1 resulted from the Hampton Court Conference, 1604, when forty- 
seven translators, or revisers, were appointed, with authority from King 
James. They were divided into six classes, each rendering a certain por- 
tion, and revising all the other portions. It aimed to preserve the excel- 
lences of all previous versions. 

II. The laws of England presumed, 1st, that the civil rulers were sound 
Christians ; 2d, that their duty was to maintain, purge, and cleanse the 
Church, and repress false doctrine ; 3d, that the people were, or should be, 
all members of the Church ; and, 4th, that the Old Testament laws against 
idolatry, blasphemy, and the like offenses, were still applicable to all error- 
ists, and to many non-conformists. No little of the preaching before the 
queen and Parliament was in support of these points, as may be seen in the 
sermons of so good a preacher as Edwin Sandys, an exile at Zurich, a 
bishop, 1559-76, and Archbishop of York, 1576-88, who preached that the 
liberty of professing diverse beliefs was dangerous to the commonwealth. 
" One God, one king, one faith, one profession, is fit for one monarchy and 
commonwealth." His sermon on " Take us the little foxes," is more severe 
than that of St. Bernard on the same favorite theme. Sandys thus divides : 
The foxes are the enemies of the Church, with their fraud and force, their 
heresies and slanders ; they must be taken to the Church and to Christ, or 
from the Church, if refractory — by ministers, by their Gospel nets, example 
of life, and discipline ; and by the civil magistrate, or ruler, by civil punish- 
ments of four kinds, death (Deut. xiii, 5 ; Lev. xx, 10 ; xxiv, 16 ; 2 Chron. 
xv, 13), by exile (2 Sam. xiii, 37, 38), by confiscation of goods, and by im- 
prisonment (2 Chron. xxxiii, 10-13). Calvin was never more theocratic 
than the Anglicans who thus argued, nor had he more of the Old Testament 
spirit. See the model " Index to the Publications of the Parker Society," 
under Magistrates, Law (Human), Power, Witchcraft, Heresy and Heretics, 
with the columns of references. Yet these good men wrote against Perse- 
cution of the Church, as may be seen under that word. Their Church, as 
did others, found errorists guilty, and delivered them over to the secular 
arm to be punished. This was a casuistic way of relieving the conscience, 
or an evasion of the old law, Quifacit per alimn, facit per se. 

III. The Thirty Years' War hi Europe, 1618-48. It was a great Ger- 
man revolution against the house of Hapsburg and the empire, at a time 
when politics, social enterprises, and literature were subordinate to religion, 
as the one engrossing interest of all Christendom. It was, at first, mainly a 



NOTES TO CHAPTER XX. 539 

war between Romanists and Protestants. The parties were, ( 1 ) the Roman- 
ists, aided by the emperor, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Poland, and certain Ger- 
man states; (2) the Protestants, supported by the evangelical German states, 
Holland, Denmark, Sweden, England sympathetically, and France after 
1634. France made the war less religious, and more political than it had 
been for a century. This complicated war had four stages : 1 . The Pala- 
tine, 1618-25. Frederick V, of the Palatinate, and son-in-law of the En- 
glish James I, failed to retain the crown of Bohemia. Protestants of Bohe- 
mia deprived of all rights, and banished or slain ; the Emperor Ferdinand 
II, reared by Jesuits, showed no mercy ; the country ruined ; less than one- 
fourth of four millions of people left in it. The Palatinate laid waste ; it 
finally fell under the Romanists. 2. The Danish, 1625-29. Christian 
IV nobly stepped forward in behalf of Protestantism ; but his failure 
left the Germans at the mercy of the terrible emperor. 3. The Swedish, 
1629-34. Gustavus Adolphus was the heroic Protestant champion against 
the imperialists, Tilly and Wallenstein ; dying in the battle of Lutzen, 1632, 
he left the great cause to be advanced by the wise Oxenstiern. David 
Leslie and other Scots, and certain Englishmen, fought under Gustavus. 
4. The French, 1635-48. Richelieu, more of a statesman than cardinal, 
took the Protestant side, in order to give France and her king the dictator- 
ship in Europe, and break the union of Austria with Spain. He and Car- 
dinal Mazarin, the great Huguenot general, Turenne, and his fellow Calvin- 
ists, thus did very much to save Protestantism outside of France. The 
Peace of Westphalia, 1648, had these main results: (1) Southern Germany 
chiefly Papist ; Northern, Protestant. (2) Calvinists placed in law on an 
equality with Lutherans. (3) Protestants and Romanists to be equally 
represented in the imperial diet ; they became more tolerant of each other. 
(4) The old empire broken ; the diet so composed that a union of German 
states was hopeless; petty princes made absolute; certain states lost. (5) 
Poverty and desperation in Germany ; e. g., in one district only three hun- 
dred and sixteen families out of seventeen hundred and seventeen remained, 
and they were in wretchedness. Magdeburg was sacked and burnt by Tilly, 
and thirty thousand people perished. Trade, industry, education, literature, 
came almost to an end ; and when a great papal general could slay forty 
thousand wretched peasants, and then wait to sell his services to the Prot- 
estants, we might ask if humanity and religion had not ended. (6) France 
gained lands and power ; and Louis XIV would soon declare himself master 
of Western Europe, and endanger Protestantism. 



540 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



Chapter XXL 

COVENANTING TIMES IN BRITAIN 

The main theme in the ecclesiastical history of England, 
from 1640 to 1662, is the introduction, establishment, and over- 
throw of presbytery. It carries with it the history of royalty, 
Anglican episcopacy, independency, various sects, free thought, 
and the republican commonwealth. It is bound together with 
the first grand debate in Christendom on toleration; a subject 
as worthy of special treatment as that of persecution, for it 
bears directly on the history of modern Christian denominations 
and of religious liberty. 

I. The Solemn League and Covenant. 

The origin, intention, and results of this measure enter 
largely into British history. It was a growth. Its roots were 
the Scottish desire for religious uniformity and the Puritan hope 
of a military alliance. In the basis offered by Henderson for 
the treaty of Ripon, October, 1640, was this: "It is to be 
wished that there were one Confession of Faith, . . . and 
one form of Church Government, in all the Churches of his 
majesty's dominions."* That wish could not be idle in 
those times. 

In May, 1641, John Pym worked through the Long Par- 
liament, with its Presbyterian majority, a Protestation, not 
unlike the National Covenant of the Scots, and for the union 
and peace of the three kingdoms. It was meant for general 
subscription. ' ' Whosoever will not take it is unfit to bear office 
in the Church or commonwealth." The king did not oppose it, 
nor the abolition of the High Commission and Star Chamber. 
But when he saw impeachment threatening his favorite bishops 



* Henderson had no idea of yielding presbytery; for he here asserts it to 
he jure divino, and episcopacy unwarranted by Scripture and not at all adapted 
to Scotland. 



CIVIL WAR. 541 

(thirteen of them were soon in the Tower), he found the chasm 
widening between him and Parliament. On which side would 
he find the Scots ? He might count on Montrose and the 
Cavaliers ; but what of Argyle and the Covenanters ? They 
were to act a grand part in the history. 

Charles was in Scotland at the very time when ' ■ poor Ire- 
land was in a welter of misery." But he failed to bind the 
Covenanters to his cause. They were looking to Henderson 
for a new Confession of Faith and Platform of Church Govern- 
ment, " wherein possibly England and we may agree." Hen- 
derson wisely waited for the outcome of the Grand Remon- 
strance of the English Commoners. In it was the demand for 
"a general Synod of the most grave, pious, learned, and judi- 
cious, divines of this Island, assisted by some from foreign 
parts professing the same Religion with us, who may consider 
all things necessary for the peace and government of the 
Church." This demand was not met until King Charles had 
turned the critical point of his career by his attempt to arrest 
the Five Members — Pym, Hampden, and their compatriots ; 
had gone from London, and left Parliament the master of the 
realm; had set up his standard at Nottingham, August, 1642, 
to fight hard on his way to ruin ; and, the next September, 
had read the decree for abolishing English prelacy at the 
end of fourteen months.* It was after Charles had fired the 
first shot at Edge Hill, and fought on in the night frosts with 
neither victory nor defeat ; after he denied to the Presbyterians 
a toleration which might have carried the Parliament over to 
his side ; after he broke off negotiations for peace, at Oxford, 
by refusing to abolish episcopacy, and by insisting upon the 
delivery of all munitions of war to him — that the demand for 
a general synod took shape in the ordinance of Parliament 
calling for the Westminster Assembly. That body was to or- 
ganize July 1, 1643, an d be ready to aid Parliament in reform- 



* Parliament received two notable petitions in November, 1640: that of fif- 
teen thousand Londoners for the abolition of the English hierarchy, and that 
of seven hundred clergymen for a reduction of its prelatic powers. In February, 
1642, the bishops were excluded from the House of Lords, with the constrained 
assent of the king. The act abolishing prelacy, but not disestablishing the 
Church, was passed September 10, 1642; yet it was not to take full effect until 
November 5, 1643. It was celebrated in London with bonfires and the ringing 
of bells. 



542 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ing and settling the government, liturgy, and doctrine of the 
Church of England, and in procuring "a nearer agreement 
with the Church of Scotland, and other reformed Churches 
abroad." Of course, "Reformed" meant Calvinistic. 

And still, how were the Scots to be brought out of their 
political neutrality ? How bind the Covenanters to the cause in 
which John Hampden was shot on Chalgrove field, and died 
praying, "O Lord, save my bleeding country?" Members of 
both the Parliament and the assembly at Westminster were 
sent to Edinburgh to treat about "Scottish assistance to Parlia- 
ment and uniformity of religion." The commissioners on both 
sides faced squarely the long mooted questions. Would Philip 
Nye's Independency do for Scotland ? Not at all, said the 
Scots; "no divine warrant therefor." Could presbytery be ex- 
tended over all England and Ireland? Possibly, in some very 
mild form, yet barely so, thought Nye and Harry Vane, who 
wished to get off with generalities. But was not the very first, 
wisest, and most needful thing, at present, an alliance for civil 
liberties? "We had hard debates," says Baillie ; "the English 
were for a civil league, we for a religious covenant." But 
religion and civil affairs were then quite inseparable. 

The result was "The Solemn League and Covenant* for 
the reformation and defense of religion, the honor and happi- 
ness of the king, and the peace and happiness of the three 
kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland." The Scottish 
Church was to be especially defended. The desired reforma- 
tion was declared to be "in doctrine, worship, discipline, and 
government, according to the Word of God, and the example 
of the best reformed Churches," so as to secure "the nearest 
conjunction and uniformity in religion, Confession of Faith, form 
of Church government, directory for worship and catechising. " 
The leaguers were to ' ' endeavor the extirpation of popery, 
prelacy, superstition, heresy, schism, profaneness, and whatso- 
ever shall be found to be contrary to sound doctrine and the 
power of godliness." 



* It was Henderson's expansion of the National Covenant. It is quoted 
here as it was amended slightly at Westminster. Vane wanted the phrase "ac- 
cording to the Word of God " inserted, so that questions of polity might be 
brought to that test, and not be taken as already settled by "the best reformed 
Churches." 



THE SOLEMN LEAGUE— THREE PARTIES. 543 

This was certainly a frank avowal of intentions. The Long 
Parliament had determined to remove prelacy, and the Scots 
meant to presbyterianize the entire British dominions.* The 
document passed their General Assembly with unanimity, ap- 
plause, and unusual emotion. The Covenanters were to aid 
the English Parliament with an army, and have six members 
in the Westminster Assembly. Aptly did Baillie write, "This 
seems to be a new period and crisis." 

Not merely a crisis, but an epoch, was in the heart of that 
League, for it was the boldest, broadest, and most republican 
attempt of British Protestantism. Popes, diets, kings, had 
sought ecclesiastical uniformity within large realms, by decrees 
or by crafty devices; it was now attempted on a more popular 
basis, by the voices and votes of the people, or by their chosen 
representatives in Parliament. Would the attempt succeed ? 

II. The Great Struggle in the English Church. 

Within the national Church of England were three parties — 
the Prelatic, Presbyterian, and Independent — each striving for 
the mastery. They were not willing to adopt Ussher's scheme 
of comprehension — that of union without uniformity. They 
were not ready to separate, and be three different Churches, for 
the day of toleration had not come. They were giving us one 
more example — the last on a grand scale by Protestants — of the 
error in employing political force to secure religious uniformity. 
Nothing is explained by cheaply denouncing them as harsh 
bigots. Their wisest leaders meant to be reasonable, conscien- 
tious, just, kindly affectioned, and apostolic in faith and polity. 
Their very heroism touches the chord of admiration in human 
nature. They deserve the candor of critical history. They 
were honestly contending for principles radically different, and 
laying bases for denominational separatism in the right of dis- 
sent and the liberty of belief. Hence our interest in the open 
conflict of those principles, and the dramatic movements which 
they caused. 

1. The Westminster Assembly, like the Council of Nice, 
shaped the ecclesiastical events of an epoch. We have seen 
how it was "ordained" by the Long Parliament. That body 

* Baillie says, "The chief aim of it was the propagation of our Church 
discipline to England and Ireland." 



544 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

named one hundred and fifty-one members — ten of them lords, 
twenty commoners, and the rest English divines — all intended 
to represent the three parties within the Church, and the coun- 
ties of the realm. The king defiantly forbade them to con- 
vene, and scarcely a prelatist attended.* In face of his threats 
sixty-nine members met in Westminster Abbey, July I, 1643, 
and from that date, through five years and a half, the assem- 
bly sat in co-operation with a dominant Parliament, to which it 
was entirely subject. It was to give advice, but was expressly 
forbidden "to exercise any jurisdiction, power, or authority 
ecclesiastical whatsoever." Its specific work was to define and 
defend doctrine, and to frame a polity for the Church, but its 
counsels extended to the repression, even the burning, of bad 
books, and the printing of Bibles at a low price ; to clerical and 
social scandals; to the case of preachers routed by the king's 
troops, as many of its members had been by Laud's bishops; 
to the settlement of "godly ministers" in vacant parishes; to 
the condign punishment of such crimes as "the blasphemies of 
one Paul Best, . . . contained in books, treatises, and notes 
of his;" to university reforms, which were easiest rooted at 
Cambridge, the Alma Mater of two thirds of its English mem- 
bers ; and to various public affairs of the realm. It was grandly 
patriotic until the king's Jesuitry wrought mischief. When 
Presbyterian London was rejoicing over the victory at Naseby, 
won June 14, 1645, ^ ie assembly turned a fast into a thanks- 
giving-day, had "a short dinner" with the Lord Mayor and city 
council, and by "the communion of salt " helped forward the 
weary discussion on Church government. This was not the 
last of the conciliatory dinners. It paused in the tough debate 
on predestination to pray that ' ' our forces in the siege of Ches- 
ter " might valiantly storm the city that day, and the Calvinists 



* Professor Mitchell (Min. West. Assembly, p. 30) says, "Had the king 
only allowed the Royalist divines to attend its meetings, some happier and for 
England more lasting compromise, as to the future constitution of the Church, 
might have been devised." Ireland had two members in the Assembly. Par- 
liament invited New England to send Reverends John Cotton, of Boston; 
Thomas Hooker, of Hartford, and John Davenport, of New Haven, but they 
did not go. The Assembly had no delegates from "the best reformed Churches" 
of the European Continent, but held correspondence with some of them, and the 
Presbyterians at one time hoped that their Covenant would serve as the model 
for a grand league of them all. 



SUBSCRIPTION TO THE COVENANT. 545 

there did it with a masterly freedom of will. Thus, creed- 
makers were acting a vigbrous part in the greatest of English 
revolutions for constitutional liberty. 

By order of Parliament, the assembly began a revision of 
the Thirty-nine Articles, and amended fifteen. It might not 
have formulated a new Confession, if Henderson, Baillie, and 
four other Scots, had not entered as members, with all 
privileges except voting, as soon as the Solemn League was 
adopted and subscribed by the Long Parliament (September 
25, 1643), and made international. Even moderate Episcopal- 
ians would hardly sign this covenant in order to qualify for a 
seat in the assembly. Of the members of that body — the 
average being scarcely eighty — the Presbyterians were the de- 
cided majority ; next were the Independents, and a few were 
Erastians.* They were soon ordered to frame a Church polity 
for England, and ' ' a Confession of Faith for the three king- 
doms, according to the Solemn League and Covenant." While 
they were at work, the nation was in the heat of war and debate, 
and the English Church was in sad confusion. 

2. The parliamentary order for a general subscription to 
the Solemn League was a test of the public sentiment of Eng- 
land. It was a tremendously solemn thing for the nobles, 
gentry, clergy, and commoners of all sorts, over eighteen years 
of age, to sign it, and swear to promote the sweeping changes 
which it demanded. Yet Parliament repeatedly ordered this to 
be done. It was adapted to Scotland, but in England ' ' it was 
a sublime blunder for a noble end." The Scots regarded its 
aim as a reformation; the Anglicans as a revolution.! It con- 
firmed the system which was the birthright of the Scots ; it 
would overthrow the Church polity under which the Anglicans 
had been born. But it did not go forth alone. It was preceded, 
attended, and followed by other parliamentary acts which galled 

*Note 1. 

t "A very Solemn Covenant, and Vow of all the people; of the awfulness 
of which we, in these days of Custom-house oaths, and loose, regardless talk, 
can not form the slightest notion." (Carlyle, Cromwell under nth Sept., 1643.) 
Baillie tells how the Scottish pastors were required to read and expound it to 
their people the first Sunday after they received it, and the next Sunday cause 
it to be sworn to and subscribed by all men and women, on pain of confiscation 
of goods, and such other penalties as Parliament should inflict. But in England 
the "refusers" were simply to lose their civil and military officers, or be re- 
ported to Parliament. 

35 



546 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

many of the people. Soldiers too often enforced them with vio- 
lence. By order of Parliament the Book of Sports had been 
burnt by the hangman ; instead of the old bonfires, May-poles, 
and feasts, were preachings and fasts ; organs, choirs, altars, 
crosses, pictures, were going from the churches ; the old merry 
Christmas, with its Advent sermon, mistletoe boughs, and mince 
pie, was turned into a fast-day, and the joy was taken from 
Easter ; clerical vestments and liturgies were to be discarded as 
relics of popery; and people who went not to church, or walked 
in profane ways, were under the discipline of Parliament, which 
knew not where to stop with its injunctions. The conscientious 
Anglicans had reason to complain, and their complaints were 
mingled with those of profligate men against the Parliament. 
The ruling party thought, as Savonarola, Calvin, and Pope Six- 
tus V had thought, that rigid law might produce righteous 
habits ; that restraints upon vicious freedom were means of 
virtuous liberty ; that the cleansing of the temples would pro- 
mote holier services ; and that they held powers ordained of 
God for enforcing the Ten Commandments. They believed that 
England was not exempt from the divine government. They 
undertook to administer it, and, whatever their mistakes and 
excesses of authority, they proved that some wholesome results 
were attainable. In towns where Parliament was obeyed, pub- 
lic vices were checked ; gambling houses were closed ; drunken- 
ness was not seen in the streets ; profane swearing was hushed ; 
the Sunday rest promoted thrift on other days ; and, if the 
villager heard psalms every morning from private houses and 
sermons every evening through chapel windows, he was none 
the worse for them in life or limb, family or property. If he 
was called a Roundhead, for clipping his hair short, which was 
not a Westminster fashion, or if he imposed a Scripture phrase, 
as a name, on his child, these were but the trifles of a style ; 
they were not the essentials of Puritan civilization. The public 
manners of the Cavaliers were more elegant, but their morals 
were less elevating in the towns where the king held sway. 

The Solemn League brought a new test to the clergy. 
In 1640 the Parliament had begun the long process of ejecting 
"scandalous and malignant ministers" from their livings. To 
be an earnest prelatist or royalist was to be a malignant. We 
now delight in the Meditations of Bishop Joseph Hall and the 



OLIVER CROMWELL. 547 

great Polyglot Bible of Bryan Walton, and wonder that such 
good men were ousted. Young Jeremy Taylor, in his rectory 
at Uppingham, was so disturbed by Parliament that he became 
a chaplain in the king's army, and then a schoolmaster in 
Wales, when not in prison, and his eloquence streamed forth in 
books, and rose for toleration.* The general rule was that if a 
parson was not immoral, negligent of duty, intensely prelatic, 
or loudly royalist, he might remain. But now he must swear 
to the Covenant and all its tremendous requirements. Such 
excellent pastors as Thomas Fuller and John Pearson would 
not take the oath, and they were ejected or they retired to the 
king's towns. Moreover, ejectment was a game that a king 
could play. His soldiers retaliated, and "plundered ministers" 
filled Westminster with cries of distress. Young Baxter, a 
Presbyterian, was routed from Kidderminster. He served for 
about three years (1642-6) as a chaplain in the armies of Par- 
liament. He subscribed the Covenant, but on his return to 
Kidderminster he kept the parish from taking it, lest men 
should "play fast and loose with a dreadful oath." After the 
death of John Pym, in December, 1643, the Independents cared 
less and less for the Solemn League. Cromwell and Milton 
seemed to forget that they had ever signed it. Every re- 
newed attempt to enforce it helped to organize the opposition 
which finally broke the power of the ruling party. Unavoid- 
ably it made covenanting a test of conscience. It promoted 
two opposite results, the Westminster Confession and the Eng- 
lish resistance to the Westminster polity. 

3. Oliver Cromwell was rising to the leadership of the 
republicans, who disliked the Covenant for its high tone of 
royalism and Presbyterian uniformity, f As a thrifty farmer 
of dropsical lands in the fen country of Huntingdon ; a mem- 
ber of the Parliament of 1628; a patriot on the side of his 
cousin, John Hampden, and Sir John Eliot ; and a serious 
thinker, who groped through dark sorrows of spirit and found 
relief in Calvinism, he had meditated deeply on the great 

*His "Liberty of Prophesying" was not published until 1647. Hallam 
over-estimates its influence in behalf of toleration. 

tBorn at Huntingdon, 1599; studied a few months at Cambridge; read 
some law in London, and married there, 1620; and for twenty years was chiefly 
engaged in improving his marshy estates. 



548 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

subjects of the time. Politically he was the greatest outcome 
of Puritanism. He had least of its peculiar formalisms, most 
of its large public spirit, and all its revolutionary daring. 
More boldly than the lordly Argyle he could repeat the maxim, 
"The safety of the people is the supreme law," and work 
directly against the king without a fear of treason. Enthu- 
siasm made him heroic ; intense as lightning where he struck, 
but not leaving so narrow and brief a light on his track. His 
life is the enigma of Puritan ethics. In his powerful letters, 
prayers, and homilies to his troops, he presents a new type of 
saintliness ; most busy in secular affairs and yet a consecrated 
layman, with devotion spontaneously on his lips ; apt to take 
his own convictions for the dictates of Jehovah, and talking 
hopefully of the speedy reign of Christ on earth. In more 
easy society he is an English squire, thickset, broad-faced, 
rather slovenly, given to short and eloquent remarks, with 
unusually good sense in all affairs of common life ; a shrewd 
manager of men who come to expect his commands over 
them ; or in leisurely hours, with intimate associates and a mug 
of beer, his large fund of humor overflows in jovial words and 
acts of buffoonery. When he shall rise into power his per- 
sonal ambition will bewray itself, willfulness trench upon char- 
tered rights, and craft be used as an art of statesmanship; and 
yet England has no other man who will do so much to place 
her upon a constitutional basis and achieve her greatness. 

With these powers in him he took his seat in the House 
of Commons (1640), and "that man there with a slouched 
hat " threw his great soul into the public cause of liberty, 
which was the talk in ale-houses and court-rooms in every parish 
and every shire of the long-enduring England. He subscribed 
three hundred pounds to reduce the Irish rebellion. He got 
permission to raise two companies of volunteers (1642) at Cam- 
bridge, and if that was treason, let the king make the most 
of it. He became the chief organizer of military associations 
in Eastern England. He drilled sectaries into good soldiers, 
and the newspapers said of them, "not a man swears but he 
pays his twelve pence ; no plundering, no drinking, disorder, 
or impiety allowed." And he defended these Ironsides; "they 
are no Anabaptists ; they are honest, sober Christians, and 
they expect to be used as men." But not much signing of the 



LEARNING AND POLEMICS. 549 

Covenant by them ; they and he rather wanted independency, 
and the army type of it began to have a vast influence. A 
series of victories was bringing him the rank of merit over 
parliamentary generals of higher titles. 

4. The learning and polemics of the time. When religion 
whetted the sword, it was likely to sharpen the pen. The Church 
became unusually militant. There were charities, faiths, hopes, 
blessed communion-days, and happy marriage-bells ; songs of 
children and holy meditations of men and of women. But 
almost every sentiment and thought took on learning and 
rushed into print. Devotion sought the press. Piety jour- 
nalized. Britain had never known such a day of authorship. 
Its enormous books are now more easily praised than read. 
Publishers must have been ruined or patrons were generous or 
readers were countless and voracious. Literature was martial. 
The muse of Milton was pugnacious. Hobbes and Cudworth 
were girding for the combat in philosophy. Love of peace 
did not keep Baxter out of polemics. Every prominent man 
had an enemy who had written a book. Controversy, doubt- 
less, increased the intelligence of the people. There was a 
war of pamphlets on the divine right of Church government — 
a subject never so ventilated before.* There were quartos of 
sermons and lectures and verbose folios of theology, whose fuel 
of debate wanted compression to make the fire enduring. 
There were Confutations of Sects, Refutations of Heresies, 
Pleas, Replies, Defenses, and yet nobody seemed to be tri- 
umphantly refuted nor contentedly defended. 

Surprise has been expressed that so many members of the 
Westminster Assembly were authors. But authorship may 
have been the charter to a seat. Dr. Stoughton says that the 
assembly divines "had learning — Scriptural, patristic, scho- 

* Bishop Joseph Hall's " Defense of Episcopacy" brought out an answer by 
Smectymnuus, a name formed with the initials of five assembly divines, S. Mar- 
shall, E. Calamy, T. Young (the chief author), M. Newcomen, and W. Spurstow. 
They and all the Scots argued for the jus divinum, divine right, of presbyterv. 
Twisse, Reynolds, Palmer, Gattaker, and others were for the jus kumanum of 
presbytery, but were outvoted. Scarcely a man of them kept his hands out 
of the public press, and all had strong voices of debate. One literary episode 
by an assembly divine was Thomas Thorowgood's "Jews in America; or, a 
Probability that the Americans [Indians] are of that Race." That still lingering 
theory bears hard on the Jews, and wrecks the logic of history. 



550 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

lastic, and modern — enough and to spare ; all solid, substantial, 
and ready for use." There sat men whose homiletic power 
was exhaustless ; Richard Vines, able to make thirty good ser- 
mons, and Dr. Tuckney thirty-two, on or about a single text, and 
Thomas Manton preaching a folio on the longest Psalm. Com- 
mentators were blest with "enlargement." Joseph Caryl on 
Job reached twelve quartos — still readable with Job's patience. 
William Greenhill's five quartos on Ezekiel did not cover the 
last twenty chapters. Dr. Gouge, an oracle in the London pul- 
pit, flooded Hebrews with thirty years of lectures. With such 
large Puritan measure other subjects were meted. The vener* 
able William Twisse, moderator of the Assembly until his death, 
in 1646, built against Arminianism his "Defense of Grace," 
and thus dryly stored his supralapsarian theology in a huge 
Latin folio, which persuaded Bishop Sanderson back into the 
Calvinistic way, and probably never found another man to read 
every word of it. Edmund Calamy wrote less, but was one 
of the moderate Calvinists and one of the many popular 
preachers in the assembly. Many items of knowledge com- 
pacted in our Biblical manuals are drawn from the vast store- 
houses of such Hebraists as Lightfoot, Rabbi Colman, and 
John Selden, the Erastian lawyer, who was fond of bantering 
the clerical members, and bringing their "little English pocket 
Bibles with gilt edges" to the test of the originals. Gillespie 
was a match for him. Greek met Greek in drawn battles. 
The young scribe, John Wallis, developed into the famous Ox- 
ford professor of mathematics, a liberal theologian, a cham- 
pion against Thomas Hobbes (who thought he had squared the 
circle), a forerunner of Isaac Newton, and one of the founders 
of the Royal Society. He shared in the progress of science 
from the time when " Smectymnuus " ridiculed the saying of 
Galileo, that "the earth moves. "* As to progress in theology, 
few now deny an advance previous to the Westminster Assem- 
bly, and in it the Presbyterian, Dr. Edward Reynolds, thought 

* The slow progress of modern astronomy will be seen by these dates : Co- 
pernicus died, 1543; Tycho Brahe, 1601 ; Kepler, 1630; Galileo, 1642; Gas- 
sendi, 1655; Isaac Newton, 1727. One of the first English defenders of Galileo 
was John-Wilkins, about 1640. He was a Solemn League clergyman, married 
Cromwell's sister, wrote on Natural Theology, discovered a planet, thought the 
moon might be inhabited, and that a journey thither was among future possi- 
bilities, and ended his life as Bishop of Chester (1688-72). Jeremiah Horrocks, 



A TURNING-POINT. 55 I 

there would be further light on the prophecies, "but in truths 
doctrinal, and especially evangelical, to cry up new lights, and 
astonish the people with metaphysical fancies, is to introduce 
skepticism into the Church of Christ." 

5. A turning-point at Marston Moor. Church polities were 
not discussed solely in the dry light of reason. They hung 
somewhat as great causes often do, on the logic of musketry. 
Prelacy was staked on the triumph of the king. Independency 
had apostles in the Ironsides. Presbytery had a hopeful eye 
on David Leslie and the Scottish Covenanters, marching South 
in January, 1644, "up to the knees in snow/' to fight for the 
Solemn League. With a glorious victory to the credit of the 
plaided Scots, divine-right presbytery might take a speedier 
sweep through the Assembly and Parliament. Baillie wrote : 
"We trust God will arise and do something by our Scots army." 
And again more naively, and with a sincere trust in Jehovah, 
he would not "haste till it please God to advance our army, 
which will much assist our arguments." Those arguments were 
with the Independents on Church polity. If properly assisted 
they might bring "a gracious reformation both in Church and 
state, not only to these dominions, but also to others abroad, 
whose eyes and hearts are much towards our motions," and 
thus covenanted presbytery might unify all Protestant mankind. 
It was a grand hope. What of the assistance by "our army?" 

About seven miles west of York, on a July evening, 1644, 
was fought the disorderly battle of Marston Moor, the bloodiest 
of the war. Cromwell, who seems to have led the forlorn hope 
in the dark hour of confusion and rout, described it as "an 
absolute victory obtained by the Lord's blessing upon the godly 
party principally." There were four notable results: (1) A 
rapid decline of the king's cause. All the east half of England 
was soon in the hands of parliament. (2) The military power 
of Cromwell was increased. In England he stood forth as the 
hero of Marston Moor. In London the news ran that the Iron- 
sides won the day and that the Scots fled. (3) The credit of 



a young Lancashire curate, found that Kepler had erred in calculating the 
transit of Venus, in 1639. He preached his sermon on Sunday afternoon, hur- 
ried to his room, and had only half an hour to see what no other man saw, the 
planet traveling across the disc of the sun. So the clergy did something for 
science. 



552 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the victory went to the Independents, and greatly affected 
ecclesiastical interests. Worse news soon came to managing 
Baillie, for in the south-west the two Presbyterian generals, 
Essex and Waller, were sorely beaten by the king. And still 
worse, in Scotland, Montrose, with a rabble of wild Highlanders 
and savage Irish, scattered the Covenanters, made a larger raid 
than usual, and wintered in the glens. The next September, 
1645, he was utterly defeated at Philiphaugh, and he wandered 
abroad five years plotting conquests on other lines. So the 
Covenant was safe once more in Scotland, while south of the 
Tweed it had to wrestle with army-independency. (4) An 
absorbing theme was speedily flung into the Westminster As- 
sembly — that of toleration. 

III. The Grand Debate on Toleration. 

The first really great debate among Protestants on religious 
toleration was in England. It is one key to the history of this 
period. The discussion ran from theologians and statesmen 
through all ranks of the people. It reached camp-fires and 
ale-houses. It affected all public interests. A literature, sur- 
prising in quantity and spirit, was employed in ventilating an 
old question. From the times of Wyclif and Sir Thomas More 
there had been, here and there all over Europe, a man pleading 
for liberty of belief. The demand came from every persecuted 
sect. ''Men begged to be tolerated long before they learned 
to tolerate." When all Churches and citizens should have 
their turn of adversity, the sacred and the universal rights of 
liberty would burn deep into the common consciousness. Thus 
the public spirit of Christianity, lost for ages, would be regained. 
How it was restored is nowhere more clearly seen than in En- 
glish history. We may know what our present religious liberty 
is worth, if we study the conflicts of an epoch, when the very 
word toleration had all varieties of meanings, and men, who 
had some true notion of it, tried to fling light into the chaos of 
writers and parties, or, thinking that it meant the sanction of 
all opinions, fought it bravely, and with a zeal for the dom- 
inance of a faith. The parties, not all of them organized, may 
be grouped about their principles. We shall specify none but 
those who admitted the right of the state to punish overt crimes, 
and (unless we except Roger Williams) recognized some vis- 



BAPTISTS IN LONDON. 553 

ible form of the Church, with its right to discipline erring 
members.* 

1. No National Church, and unlimited toleration by the 
state, or rather absolute liberty of faith and worship. Among 
the English Separatists in Holland was Rev. John Smyth, who 
probably immersed himself, felt so averse to liturgies that he 
thought the Bible ought not to be read publicly in churches, 
nor psalms sung from a printed page, gave an Arminian shape 
to his vague theology, and at Amsterdam (1608-9) gathered a 
flock of English Baptists, who began to be more clearly distin- 
guished from the Anabaptists. With their next pastor, Thomas 
Helwisse, they put forth, in 161 1, a Declaration of Faith, in 
which they said: "The magistrate is not to meddle with relig- 
ion or matters of conscience, nor compel men to this or that 
form of religion, because Christ is the king and lawgiver of the 
Church and conscience." Professor Masson regards this as 
"the first expression of the absolute principles of liberty of 
conscience in the public articles of any body of Christians." 
When some of them returned Helwisse gathered in an obscure 
retreat the first congregation of Arminian Baptists in London. 
King James and Parliament may have tried to find it, if the 
poor working-man, Leonard Busher, was a member thereof, 
and if they meditated on his "Plea for Liberty of Conscience," 
printed in 1614, for the enlightening of their minds. Similar 
tracts followed, probably from the same conventicle. If these 
lowly people did not virtually unchurch all non-immersers, their 
voices deserved a more careful hearing in high quarters. But 
their pleas were not the first, in England, on that subject. In 
1 60 1 Lord Bacon advocated the toleration of Romanists. Not 
later than 1605 some writer, who was answered as a "Puritan 
Papist," argued strongly for the abolition of all civil laws which 
restrained the freedom of conscience, faith, and worship. 

* There were sects which, unrestrained, would have produced social, civil, 
moral, and religious anarchy, and become bad citizens. The broadest Toler- 
ationists who are worthy of our notice did not mean to indulge them in crimes 
openly committed in the name of "pretended conscience." They raised the 
question whether such criminals should be punished as religionists or as citizens 
oy the state. Their answer virtually was: Let the Church discipline her voluntary 
members with excommunication as the extreme penalty ; and let the state justly 
punish criminals as citizens, but not make mere non-conformity a crime. Such 
a theory was as startling in that age as its opposite would be to as. 



554 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

This principle found a louder voice in Roger Williams, who 
was more than a year in England (1643-4) getting a slender 
charter for his Rhode Island colony, and very active in reliev- 
ing the wants of the poor in London. He was now growing 
out of "the Baptist way," and was a progressive seeker, rather 
hopeless of finding any true Church on earth, but fascinating 
in his magnanimity towards all men, if we must not except the 
poor Quakers. * As the guest of the younger Harry Vane, he 
could talk eloquently in high circles. His stormful booksf 
threw out such flashes of Welsh fire as these: "No National 
Church instituted by Christ. Evil is always evil, yet permission 
of it may in case be good. It is the will and command of God 
that . . . permission of the most pagan, Jewish, Turkish, 
or Antichristian consciences and worships be granted to all 
men in all nations ; they are to be fought against only with the 
sword of the Spirit, the Word of God. The civil power owes 
three things to the true Church of Christ: Approbation, Sub- 
mission [of the believing rulers to membership], and Protection. 
The civil magistrate owes two things to false worshipers: Per- 
mission and Protection." Leaving this advice to England, 
humane Roger shipped for America. What fire his "bloody 
tenet" drew will presently appear. 

2. A National Church with unlimited toleration. Such men 
as Williams and John Goodwin (not Calvinistic Thomas in 
the Assembly, but the unformulated Arminian) could scarcely 
hope for more than this in England. Parliament was not likely 
to adopt the voluntary principle of Church support. In his 
radical books John Goodwin shot far beyond his calmer, inde- 



* Baillie wrote: " My good acquaintance, Mr. Roger Williams, says there is 
no Church, no sacraments, no pastors, no Church-officers, or ordinance in the 
world, nor has there been since a few years after the apostles." Williams was 
then the chief, if not the founder, of the sect of the seekers after truth and a 
Church. The Quakers were as eager for liberty of conscience as he was, but he 
came to think them "insufferably proud and contemptuous unto all their superi- 
ors in using thou to every body. ... I have therefore publicly declared 
myself that a due and moderate restraint and punishment of these incivilities, 
though pretending conscience, is so far from persecution, properly so called, that 
it is a duty and command of God unto all mankind." Thus, in 1672, good 
Roger wrote. 

tThe Bloudy Tenent [Bloody Tenet] of Persecution, 1643. Certain "Que- 
ries" to Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, 1644. When next in Eng- 
land, 1652, he published "The Hireling Ministry none of Christ." 






DISCRETIONARY TOLERATION. 555 

pendent brethren, and he alarmed the camp of Baillie, who 
fairly described him thus. "He is a bitter enemy of presby- 
tery, and is openly for a full liberty of conscience of all sects, 
even Turks, Jews, Papists." But this did not mean full license 
of immorality. On this ground we shall find John Locke. 

3. A National Church with no toleration provided by law; 
that is, uniformity required by law in the Church, and the 
religious freedom of dissenters left to the discretion of the 
rulers of the state or the State-Church. Thus conformity was 
essential to good citizenship; the one was virtually identical 
with the other. This had all along been the Anglican theory. 
Laud had reduced discretionary tolerance to a minimum. Relig- 
ious dissent was construed as political rebellion. The king's 
party would, if possible, restore prelacy on this basis. If any 
other party then in Britain held this principle it must be sought 
among the advocates of presbytery. Some of them will appear 
in our next class, but there were extremists in their ranks. 
None of them understood the word toleration in our sense as a 
"permission for the free exercise of a religion different from 
that established." We do not readily understand it in their 
sense. They thought that it involved indorsement, sanction, 
the legalization of error, and even of overt crime by both state 
and Church. They thought that religious error deserved pun- 
ishment by the civil laws, that a "pretended conscience" was 
no shelter for it, and that a Presbyterian conscience was attain- 
able by all honest souls. To grant freedom to a heretic was to 
approve the heresy. To require popular conformity and yet 
allow personal non-conformity was to make the law a dead 
letter; it was driving the law into suicide. 

What was their notion of intolerance? Simply the mental 
and moral condemnation, or even hatred, of error? If so, it 
was a righteous sentiment common to all just men. Error in 
religion was like pain in Mr. Coleman, whose severe illness 
evoked the prayers and visits of the Assembly divines, or like 
the indwelling sin of the saintly Rutherford ; intolerable, unsanc- 
tioned, and yet not a thing to be repressed by the laws of 
Parliament. Or did they mean the judicial punishment — not 
merely Church excommunication — of the errorist by the state? 
Candor must attribute the second sense to one party of the 
Presbyterians. The Scots had it in their laws, and the English 



556 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

had it in the polity of Cartwright. The magnanimous Hender- 
son, in his proposals for the treaty of Ripon, 1 640-1, argued 
that by his scheme of union on the basis of presbytery, "all 
heresies, errors, and schisms, abounding under episcopal gov- 
ernment, shall be suppressed" by the agencies and laws of 
Church and state. In their Covenant they had sworn to attempt 
the extirpation of all such evils, lest they should "partake in 
other men's sins." Parliament had ordered the Assembly to 
devise measures for uniformity, and the Presbyterians there 
meant to do it in the face of all sectaries who were defining 
toleration in alarming senses. They were not the men to shirk 
that hard but welcome duty. 

Their Epiphanius was Rev. Thomas Edwards, with his 
"Gangraena, " or expository catalogue of one hundred and 
seventy-six errors and heresies, which he urged Parliament to 
repress by law, at the earliest moment. In his view, the vast 
jungle of them grew rankest on the soil of Arminianism and 
in the moisture of independency ; they flourished most wherever 
Calvinism and presbytery were feeblest. Scotland alone had no 
legal climate for them ; and was not the remedy for the errors 
of England simple enough? "Oh, let ministers oppose toler- 
ation, as that by which the devil would at once lay a founda- 
tion for his kingdom through all generations." And Satan's 
masterpiece was in the scheme of the Assembly independents, 
"holy men, excellent preachers, moderate and fair men," who 
sought the "allowance of a latitude to some lesser differences 
with peaceableness. " Edwards thus uttered the convictions of 
a troop of special pleaders who rushed into print. His books 
were in demand, but he was too rancorous to be the leader 
of a winning party. 

The real leaders of this party regarded the national Church 
of England as a ship on which mutiny was rising ; absolute 
authority must be used until the danger of anarchy was laid. 
Then the religious differences which remained might be indulged 
at the discretion of wise rulers, and thus have no sanction of law. 
The view was not unreasonable in that age ; and there were 
judicious, kind-hearted men, who could be intrusted with such 
a discretionary toleration, if monarchs would permit. 

4. A National Church, with limited toleration by the state. 
This was the middle ground of that day. On it all dissenters, 



THE INDEPENDENTS. 557 

regarded as evangelical, should have liberty ; but dangerous 
errors, though held with a " pretended conscience," should be 
repressed by the civil law. This was the theory of the Calvin- 
istic Independents, from the time of John Robinson to that 
of John Owen, who would have civil rulers restrain and coerce 
the open deniers of essential truths. It was in full blast in the 
state Churches of New England, where Thomas Shepard wrote, 
"It is Satan's policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless 
toleration," and other good men used stronger terms.* 

Baillie thought that the Independents in the Assembly, 
"most able men and of great credit, feared no less than ban- 
ishment from their native country if presbyteries were erected 
in England." Perhaps they did. During the earlier debates 
on Church polity they put forth the famous Apologetical Nar- 
ration (January, 1644), in which they stated their principles, 
told of their experiences in exile, and besought Parliament 
"to allow them to continue in their native country, with the 
enjoyment of the ordinances of Christ, and an indulgence in 
some lesser differences, as long as they continue peaceable 
subjects." Baillie says, "We were mightily displeased there- 
with, and so was most of the Assembly." This Apology was 
one stimulus to the many writers and preachers against tolera- 
tion and the sects, f It drew many a heavier craft into the 
dreary ocean of debate. 

When Army Independency was flushed with the triumph at 
Marston Moor the majority of the assembly, alarmed at the 
increase and boldness of the sectaries, urged Parliament to show 
some vigor in repressing them, according to the terms of the 
Covenant. One result was that the ' ' Bloody Tenet " was offi- 
cially burnt. Herbert Palmer, in a fast -day sermon before 
Parliament, referred to other books which demanded freedom 
for all religions as worthy of the fire. One of them was John 
Milton's "wicked book, deserving to be burnt" for its abom- 



« "Even in the New England colonies, where Congregationalism was the 
rule, there were not only spiritual censures and excommunications of heretics, 
but whippings, banishments, and other punishments of them, by the civil power." 
(Masson, Life of Milton, III, 109, to whom I am much indebted in these sections.) 

t The Assembly Independents justly complained that they, were included 
among the "sectaries" whose opinions were described in volumes by Prynne, 
Edwards, Paget, Featly (episcopal), Baxter, and our friend Baillie in his "Dis- 
suasive." 



558 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

inable doctrine of divorce. Milton was soon in the troubles 
of few. He threw out the most famous of his tracts, the 
" Areopagitica ; or Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
Printing." It was to do effective service in the long battle for 
the freedom of the press. It marks the time, 1644, when he 
had no more lofty praise for the Westminster divines, and went 
over to the Cromwellian Independents. Eloquent for civil and 
religious liberty, he wanted no tolerance shown to popery and 
open superstitions, for they were destructive of true religion 
and free governments. 

This vigorous movement against the sectaries and books in 
their interest roused Cromwell. He came to Westminster and 
moved the House of Commons ; and Baillie tells how he sud- 
denly obtained an order for considering "the accommodation, 
or toleration, of the Independents — a high and unexpected 
order! . . . This has much afflicted us." The order meant 
this : Let the Presbyterians and Independents endeavor to unite 
on a Church polity; if union is not possible, let them try to 
find some safe way of indulging tender consciences, so that 
they may have freedom under the coming establishment ; and 
let it come soon, for England has no Church government. 
Presbyter Marshall had a hand in this expedient to hasten for- 
ward the Assembly's work. The parties could not agree on a 
polity, but their mutual love and admiration increased. Most 
of the Presbyterians in the Assembly and Parliament were more 
disposed to indulge the lesser differences. With all his ardent 
words against toleration, Baillie wished errors to be put down 
without "secular violence." When Rutherford sent out his 
book against "Pretended Liberty of Conscience," with the old 
logic for taking the little foxes, he left room for the treatment 
of pious non- conformists with forbearance. Still later his 
"Lex Rex" — Law is King — showing that royalty is not of 
drvine right, was a noble defense of popular liberty. 

The Marquis of Argyle, on a visit at Westminster, June, 
1646, delivered and printed a speech, which made a great and 
happy impression on the Londoners. Doubtless he spoke for 
the more indulgent Presbyterians when he said: "We must 
beware of some rocks on the right and left hand, and hold the 
middle path. Upon the one part, we should take heed not to 
settle lawless liberty in religion, whereby, instead of uniformity, 



THE WESTMINSTER FORMULARIES. 559 

we should set up a thousand heresies and schisms. . . . Upon 
the other part, we are to look that we persecute not piety and 
peaceable men, who can not, through scruple of conscience, 
come up in all things to the common rule [of faith and polity] ; 
but that they may have such a forbearance as may be according 
to the Word of God, may consist with the Covenant, and not 
be destructive to the rule itself, nor to the peace of the Church 
and kingdom." 

All parties in the Assembly agreed on the doctrine, which 
came for the first time into a public Confession of Faith, that 
' ' God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free 
from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in 
any thing contrary to his Word, or beside it, in matters of 
faith or worship." This must be read in the light of their 
time if we would know what they meant by it. The majority 
of them also declared that the civil magistrate (ruler) "hath 
authority, and it is his duty, to take order . . . that all 
blasphemies and heresies be suppressed, . . . and all the 
ordinances of God be duly settled, administered, and observed;" 
also that "tolerating a false religion" is a sin forbidden by the 
Second Commandment.* This old doctrine of civil authority 
went for the last time into a Protestant creed. It was meant 
to work in the interest of true liberty, which had to come by 
eternal truths and on fortified lines, and liberty happily survived 
the rigorous means and methods of guarding it. 

IV. The Westminster System Established. 

1. The Westminster Formularies. The construction of the 
four things mentioned in the Covenant went on quite simulta- 
neously, and were ratified by Parliament in the following order : 

(1) The Directory for Worship, to take the place of the 
English liturgy, but far less liturgical. With this was the 



* The last phrase quoted was erased, and the articles on the powers and 
duties of the civil magistrate were greatly modified, in 1788, by the Presbyterian 
Church in the United States of America. Other Presbyterian Churches in 
America and Great Britain have also far more mildly defined the authority of 
civil rulers in matters of religion. One of them officially declares that civil 
rulers "ought not to punish any as heretics or schismatics," nor "in the least 
interfere to regulate matters of faith and worship." On this important subject 
there has been a general departure from the Westminster theory. 



560 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Psalmody, by Sir Francis Rous, an old, most honest member 
of both Parliament and Assembly. 

(2) The Form of Presbyterial Church Government, to sup- 
plant the episcopal system. It was the first and last topic of 
debate, and was never completed satisfactorily to any of the 
parties. 

(3) The Confession of Faith. This seems to have been 
based very largely on the Irish Articles of Archbishop Ussher. 
Its framers had each vowed to " maintain nothing in point of 
doctrine but what I believe to be most agreeable to the Word 
of God." They did not absurdly divorce theology from logic 
and philosophy. They formulated doctrines which, they 
thought, ' ' by good and necessary consequence may be de- 
duced from Scripture." They gave a more full and scientific 
expression to their beliefs than ever had been given by Prot- 
estants. They avowed a widely branched theology. The area 
of formulated doctrines must equal the field of popular discus- 
sion. Whatever the framers regarded as the chief errors of all 
ages found a protest in the Confession. Between the members 
were germs of nearly all the doctrinal differences which still lie 
within Calvinism. They had sharper, longer, more scholastic dis- 
cussions on theological points than has usually been represented.* 
Their extremest definitions were quite moderate in those con- 
troversial days. The Confession was meant to be conservative; 
a fair, honest compromise between the parties. John Selden 
did not believe it all — certainly not its predestination — yet he 
and others voted for it, as he said, not personally, but conven- 
tionally, or as a system. Thus men of that day, such as 
Baxter, accepted it ; and men of variant theologies in our time 
continue to eulogize it as "the outline of a perfect system of 
divinity." Dr. Daniel Curry, well known as an earnest Meth- 
odist, with no sanction of its peculiar doctrines, frankly says 
that it "is the clearest and most comprehensive system of 
doctrine ever formed. . . . It is not only a wonderful 
monument of the intellectual greatness of its framers, but 

* This fact comes to light in the long-lost and recently published "Minutes 
of the Westminster Assembly, 1644-49;" edited by Professor A. F. Mitchell, D. D., 
and Rev. John Struthers, D. D., Edinburgh, 1874. On limited atonement, or the 
Saumur theory that Christ died hypothetically for all mankind, though effica- 
ciously only for the elect, Baillie tells of "a long and tough debate; yet, thanks 
to God! all is gone right, according to our mind." 



PRESBYTERY ESTABLISHED. 56 1 

also a comprehensive embodiment of nearly all the precious 
truths of the Gospel." 

(4) The two Catechisms. The Larger, so full of practical 
theology drawn out with over-minuteness, was chiefly the work 
of Dr. Anthony Tuckney, the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge. 
The Shorter, in which were the compressing hands of John 
Wallis and Herbert Palmer, is a remarkable specimen of exact 
verbal expression and scientific definition. 

2. Presbytery established in England. During the years 
1 645- 1 649 there were two movements, contemporaneous and 
opposite ; one largely political, the other ecclesiastical. By 
one the Presbyterians were losing military control and popular- 
ity ; by the other they gained the establishment of their Church 
polity in law. In the one were these events : 

(1) The failure of the attempted treaty with the king at 
Uxbridge (January, 1645) was a severe blow to the Presby- 
terians. He would not take the Covenant, but they were 
committed as royalists.* 

(2) By the Self-denying Ordinance of Parliament none of 
its then existing members could hold any executive office, civil 
or military. Cromwell, who had moved it, was excepted, and 
the rule did not apply to future members. The existing Pres- 
byterian generals were practically cashiered. The new elections 
to fill vacancies in Parliament brought in good civilians of their 
party, but not military men, and among the new members 
were several of Cromwell's best army officers — some of them 
were lawyers — who could both vote there and command on the 
field of battle. 

(3) The New Model of the army, on the plan of the Iron- 
sides, was intended to clear it of partisan and club-house gen- 
erals, and fill it with men who would fight as patriots and not 
as sectarians, and not be afraid of hurting the enemy. They 
need not take the Covenant. Lord Fairfax had the chief com- 
mand, but the genius of Cromwell was pre-eminent. In this 
army was John Bunyan, "not yet writing his 'Pilgrim's Pro- 

*Not unreasonably; for, though they had just sent Laud to the block 
(January 10, 1645), tne y were conservative as to the monarchy, and the king 
still held nearly half of England. The country west of a line drawn from Car- 
lisle to Oxford and Portsmouth was mainly royal; nearly all east of it was par- 
liamentarian. Also Montrose was not yet routed from Scotland, and Ireland 
was mainly royalist. 

36 



562 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

gress ' on paper, but acting it on the face of the earth, with 
a brown match-lock on his shoulder." Cromwell reported: 
"Presbyterians, Independents, all have here the same spirit of 
faith and prayer ; they agree here, have no names of difference ; 
pity it should be otherwise anywhere ! . And for breth- 

ren, in things of the mind we look for no compulsion, but that 
of light and reason. In other things God hath put the sword in 
the Parliament's hands. ... If any plead exemption from 
that, he knows not the Gospel." The newspapers said these 
sentences were "very remarkable," and so do we. Lingard 
says of these Ironsides : ' ' They divided their time between mili- 
tary duties and prayer ; they sang psalms as they advanced to 
the charge. . . . The soldiers of God proved more than a 
match for the soldiers of the monarch." This intended irony 
was quite the truth in their victory at Naseby (June, 1645), 
which went to the further credit of army-independency. 

(4) The agents of Charles made a secret treaty with the 
Irish (August, 1645), by which he was to grant the Romanists 
in all his realm full liberty, and they were to send him twenty- 
thousand soldiers. He wrote to the pope for the papal sanction 
of this scheme. At this very time he was trying to bring Par- 
liament to terms of peace, and saying, " I will never abrogate 
the laws against the papists." The plot was not detected for 
two months. The Independents had the treaty read in Parlia- 
ment. The London newspapers were alive with indignation. 
"Kings often deal like watermen; look one way and row an- 
other." His army was soon disbanded, and the Irish did not 
come. This was not the last of his double-dealing. While 
offering to come to London and treat with the Presbyterians, 
he was secretly proposing to the Independents liberty of con- 
science if they would uproot presbytery. "I am not without 
hope," he wrote, "that I shall be able to draw either the Pres- 
byterians or Independents to side with me, for extirpating the 
one or the other, that I shall be really king again." The Pres- 
byterians might have abandoned all hope of covenanting him, 
if he had not made a new move. 

(5) Acting under the advice of a French agent, sent by 
Cardinal Mazarin, who hoped to reinstate Charles by means of 
the Presbyterians and papists, he secretly wandered to the camp 
of the Scots at Newark, and put himself in their hands. They 



CHARLES WITH THE SCOTS. 563 

told him that they had no part in the French scheme. They 
could not endure a league with Romanists. Both he and they 
wished they were miles apart. In London, the Independents 
were enraged. They felt outwitted. They saw what must 
come if the king bent to the Solemn League. A crisis hung 
on his nod. The majority of the House of Commons would 
no longer trust him. They would risk any thing rather than 
his license of popery. They requested the Scots to say what 
was owing to their long-unpaid army, and to retire from the 
kingdom. The Scots found that the king had no intention of 
taking the Covenant, nor had they of selling him, commercially, 
if he refused. At last they surrendered him to the commis- 
sioners of Parliament, with the understanding that "no harm 
should be done to his person." The much-needed arrears were 
paid them. "They got their money, but more than their 
money's worth of abuse," then and ever since. But on their 
homeward way (January, 1647), with the curses of royalist 
women flung at them, they took comfort in thinking that the 
uncovenanted king was in the hands of the English Presby- 
terians. Would they bring him to terms? 

The wonder is that, in this stream of events, presbytery was 
legalized in England. We need not wonder that it had to 
depend on law, rather than love for the system. By acts of 
Parliament, extending from January, 1645, through nearly four 
years, it was formally established.* The local churches were, 
if possible, to be reorganized with Presbyterian sessions. The 
five millions of English people were expected to worship accord- 
ing to the Directory, for "the indulgence to tender consciences 
shall not extend to tolerate the Common Prayer." The ten 
thousand parishes were to be grouped into presbyteries, or 
classes, and these into provincial synods. As to representa- 
tion, there was a consistent plan. The congregations were to be 
represented in their sessions ; the sessions, in the presbyteries, 
by delegates ; the presbyteries, in the synods ; the synods (about 
sixty) in the National Assembly ; and the assembly, in the hope- 
fully future council of Pan-presbyterianism. A grand scheme, 
if England's people and other mankind would take to it heartily ! 
The only provinces where there was any depth of earth for 

* Parliament did not ratify certain chapters of the Westminster Confession 
relating to Church courts arid the civil power. 



564 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the system were London and Lancashire. The citizens of Lon- 
don were so resolutely Presbyterian that they could storm the 
doors of Parliament when it seemed to flinch from the Cove- 
nant, and many of the one hundred and twenty parish ministers 
were as heroic. Yet the twelve presbyteries of that province 
were annoyed with the growth of sects ; with the increase of 
private meetings, eleven in one parish ; with preaching by 
women and ignorant men, and with the failures of Parliament 
to repress them. The system was more thoroughly rooted in 
Lancashire, and had there a longer existence. One part of the 
vast plan was to fill all the university chairs with such profes- 
sors as were described by Dr. Anthony Tuckney, when he was 
Urged to appoint "only the true godly" as teachers in Cam- 
bridge, and he replied, with admirable sense, "No man has a 
greater respect than I have to the truly godly ; but I am de- 
termined to choose none but sclwlars. They may deceive me in 
their godliness; they can not in their scholarship." Another 
effort was to endow good schools in every parish. There may 
still be found in rural districts of England, here and there a 
school with a small endowment for the master who shall teach 
the Shorter Catechism. 

3. Historical reasons for the failure of the system in England. 
The want of suitable pastors, of subscription to the Confession, 
and of the Church's right to make her discipline final,* and the 
towering influence of Cromwell, have been alleged. They had 
their effects. But the real causes lay deeper. 

(1) The polity was not an English product. It was an im- 
portation, an exotic, for which there was no popular demand. 
It came as one of the accidents of a great political revolution. 
The people could not separate it from political measures, when 
it was forced on them by Parliament. Prelacy was their birth- 
right, and they were not in a mood for lectures on the divine 
right of presbytery. 

(2) It cost too much ; cost deep sorrows and poverties, for 
all Anglican parsons, who refused both Covenant and conform- 
ity, had feelings of the human kind, and some had families, 
with all the human liabilities to starvation and wretchedness, 
when turned out of their homes. The Anglican Fuller says 
that ' ' many were outed for their misdemeanors ; some were 

-Note II. 



A FAIR CHANCE LOST. 565 

guilty of scandalous enormities." But "many others were 
rigorously cast out for following their preceding judgments and 
consciences," and he was one of the best of them, " being pun- 
ished for the same with the loss of my livelihood." From 1640 
to 1653 about sixteen hundred clergymen were permanently 
ousted, for various reasons, by order of Parliament. One-fifth 
of their former livings was granted them. Not all of them 
were Episcopalians. Those who were termed ' ' malignants " 
suffered worse things than ejectment. The best men felt that 
sharpest pain which comes from a sense of wrong done to them, 
and a right taken away by force. 

(3) By failing to offer toleration, the leading champions of 
presbytery* missed their grandest opportunity. They let slip 
their last fair chance in 1647, when they had won the captive 
king almost to their terms. They would disband the army, 
for the first civil war had ended. They would restate him on 
his throne and exempt him from the Covenant, if he would 
give their system a trial of three years. To check this move- 
ment, the generals of the army contrived to get possession of 
the king, led their troops nearer to London, and said in their 
manifesto to its council, "We desire no alteration in the civil 
government. As little do we desire to interrupt the settling of 
the presbyterial government." They asked that every good, 
upright, moral citizen might have liberty of conscience and 
worship. Assure us of our rights as soldiers, and of a speedy 
settlement of national affairs, and ' ' we shall be most ready to 
disband, or to go for Ireland." 

To have Cromwell "go for Ireland" on such terms, seems 
to us reasonable. But Parliament did not grant them. Ex- 
tremer demands came from the army. The generals sought to 
bring the king to their terms. Parliament was pressed on two 
sides, and swinging between the demands of the army and the 
dictation of a London mob. Charles escaped to the Isle of 
Wight, and was placed in Carisbrook Castle. There certain 
Scots visited him, and entered into their Engagement to en- 
throne him, and thus have presbytery royally established in 
England for three years, and secure a repression of the Inde- 
pendents and all the sects.* The Engagers were to co-operate 

*" Scotland is in a disastrous, distracted condition; overridden by a Ham- 
ilton majority in [its] Parliament. Poor Scotland will, with exertion, deliver its 



566 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

with bands of insurgents in England, Wales, and Ireland. 
These uprisings in various quarters simultaneously, might draw 
the army away from London, break it into fragments, and ruin 
Cromwell. Then came one of the most desperate political 
strokes. Just when the king's hopes of mastery were reba- 
nished ; when he was making tools of men whom he would 
certainly deceive ; when the second civil war had begun; when 
every great liberty was in peril ; when moderate Presbyterians 
were disposed to grant a wise toleration; when the Independ- 
ents, who had controlled the House of Commons for some 
weeks, had sent their military members to the separate fields of 
war; and when the Westminster Assembly had done its main 
work, and dwindled into a mere committee for examining min- 
isters, the extremists of Parliament struck a fatal blow to their 
own cause. They passed an ordinance, in May, 1648, con- 
demning to imprisonment all persons found guilty of maintain- 
ing openly certain opinions, such as these : that presbytery was 
Antichristian, or infant baptism unlawful ; * also punishing with 
death, without benefit of clergy, all persons found guilty of 
c willfully teaching, writing, or printing opinions contrary to the 
legalized doctrines of the Trinity, Atonement, Inspired Canon, 
Resurrection, and Final Judgment ! It was not so bad as an 
old law of the High Commission, and yet it amazes us. It was 
an intended coup d'etat. But the political stroke recoiled on 
Parliament. Another step will show an effect of it. 

(4) The new system was too deeply implicated in the roy- 
alist politics of the second civil war. The Scottish Engagement 
was a renewal of the former attempts to treat with the king on 
the basis of covenanted uniformity. It rent the Northern 
Covenanters into two parties, and, says Baillie, ' ' it was the 
great and only question for the time." The Duke of Ham- 
ilton led some twenty thousand Engagers down to Preston 
(August, 1648), where Cromwell drove him "into as miserable 
ruin as his worst enemy could wish." Elsewhere the insur- 
gents were put down. The second civil war in England had a 



'king from the power of sectaries;' and is dreadfully uncertain what it will do 
with him when delivered! Perhaps Oliver will save it the trouble !" (Carlyle's 
Cromwell, Letter LXI.) 

*This would have put several officers of the army, such as Fleetwood and 
Hutchinson, and more of its chaplains, into prison. 



THE COMMONWEALTH. 567 

swift end. It was transferred to Scotland. Argyle, David 
Leslie, and other anti-engaging lords who wanted no uncove- 
nanted king, were at the head of the Protesters and Whigs of the 
West. On their side was the General Assembly of the kirk. 
Cromwell went up to aid them in their struggle. The En- 
gagers were severely repressed for a time, but the two parties 
had long strifes in the kirk. Argyle was chief in the new 
government, and friendly to the advanced party in England. 
So Cromwell, and not Charles, was the gainer by the plot. 

The king's hope was now in a treaty with Parliament. But 
neither he nor it was trusted when liberty was at stake. The 
Ironside army was at hand. Colonel Pride administered his 
notable purge. About one hundred and forty Presbyterian and 
royalist members of the House of Commons were barred out 
or frightened away. Scarcely sixty members were left. They 
may be termed Cromwellians. Their High Court tried, de- 
posed, and beheaded the king, January 30, 1649, f° r treason. 
John Milton was the first eminent man, outside of Parliament, 
who boldly justified the deed in his " Tenure of Kings," and 
that judgment has been confirmed by a long train of judicial 
writers. But the apology for "the royal martyr" at once took 
the extreme form of a marvelous worship, which exalted 
his sufferings into a parallel with those of Christ, and still 

asserts that — 

"A monarch from his throne 
Springs to his cross and finds his glory there."* 

English presbytery, on the basis of covenanted uniformity, 
made no further advance. With all its excellent men, great 
principles, large aims in theology, discipline, and education, it 
lay entangled in the meshes of politics. Its mistake had been 
in its methods. It had all along been in the control of a Par- 
liament which was mighty in deposing an old ecclesiasticism, 
but was not apostolic in using political force to establish a 
new system. 

V. The Commonwealth and British Churches. 

Early in 1649 tne government of England began its career 
as a commonwealth, with no king, no House of Lords, no 
Westminster Assembly, and not much Scottish Covenant, but 

* Keble's Christian Year. 



568 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

with a simpler Engagement* for binding the people to its inter- 
ests; with the House of Commons which held on to its power 
through four longer years (some absent members returning) ; 
with a Council of State, whose secretary of foreign tongues was 
John Milton; with Oliver Cromwell very soon as commander- 
in-chief of the dictatorial army; with presbytery in existence 
by law rather than life ; and with an outlook that was extremely 
dismal. All affairs, civil and religious, were at a crisis. Lev- 
elers, communists, and fifth-monarchy men had to be promptly 
taught, by military scourging, that their millennium had not 
dawned. The motto of the new republic might well have been 
England against the world, for, so far as it could yet hear, the 
exterior old world was in tremendous wrath, since the ax had 
fallen on the divine right of kings. Prince Charles Stuart, in 
his twentieth year, sheltered in Holland by the president, his 
brother-in-law, was hastily recognized as England's king by 
most of the chief European powers. The next news might be 
that he had landed royally either in Ireland or Scotland, for in 
both he had been proclaimed king.f In a large degree Crom- 
well's sword and Milton's pen were to reverse this dismal 
outlook. 

I. The policy in Ireland. In August, 1649, Cromwell was 
sent to Ireland, where Derry and Dublin were the chief places 
in the hands of the commonwealth. He had to fight Protest- 
ants and papists, and he kept the latter mindful of that "most 
barbarous massacre that ever the sun beheld." He began with 
the storming of Drogheda. If the three thousand defenders of 
its garrison were chiefly of English blood, they were leagued 
with native Celts, who rarely gave quarter. He had not been a 
cruel warrior, and but one direct witness started the charge that 
even the unarmed towns-people were willfully ordered to be 



* "I do declare and promise that I will be true and faithful to the common- 
wealth of England, as the same is established, without a king, or a House of 
Lords." After January, 1650, it was required to be subscribed by all the men 
of the realm. It practically set aside the Covenant. 

t Three parties were pressing Charles II with treaties on different bases; the 
Anglicans, on condition of restored episcopacy; the papists, on that of full tol- 
eration for themselves ; and the Covenanting Presbyterians, on that of the Sol- 
emn League. The two last probably knew that they must provide against the 
Stuart facility of lying, and they felt able to manage him. If not, their blind- 
ness is amazing to us. 



IRISH PRESBYTERIANS. 569 

slaughtered. There was a butchery too terrible for our de- 
fense.* But Cromwell's report softens the reddest colors of the 
accusation. Of his troops he says: "Being in the heat of 
action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the 
town." If all the military officers were slain the small remnant 
of the soldiers who surrendered were nearly all shipped for the 
Barbadoes. He said : ' ' I am persuaded that this is a righteous 
judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have im- 
brued their hands in so much blood, and that it will tend to 
prevent the effusion of blood for the future ; which are the satis- 
factory grounds to such actions which otherwise can not but 
work remorse and regret." The Irish royalists were appalled. 
When other cities were taken by less severe methods, he chal- 
lenged the papal clergy, who had published accusations against 
him, to show an instance of one man, by his orders willfully 
slain, or banished, or deprived of his lands, who was not in 
arms, or busy (as the priests were) in arming the people ; and 
who had not thus forfeited his life and property. 

Ireland was effectually conquered. A new religious policy 
was inaugurated by Cromwell as lord-lieutenant, and as pro- 
tector. (1) The leaders of the Romanists were treated with 
great severity. Cromwell undertook to settle their rebellious 
nobles and landed gentry in Connaught ; shut them in there as 
political lepers, and apportioned their houses and lands to his 
unpaid soldiers, to Englishmen who had advanced money for 
the Irish war, and to all Protestants, even Bohemians, who 
would come. More successful was the scheme of banishing, 
on twenty days' notice, the Jesuits and all the papal clergy. 
If they remained, they were liable to death for treason. More 
than a thousand of them went into exile. Some were impris 
oned for years. Only one Romish prelate remained on the 
island. This rigor would have its reaction. (2) The Estab- 

* Carlyle says : " Terrible surgery this ; but is it surgery and judgment, or 
atrocious murder merely ? That is a question that should be asked and answered. 
Oliver Cromwell did believe in God's judgments, and did not believe in the rose- 
water plan of surgery — which, in fact, is this editor's case, too. . . . An 
armed soldier solemnly conscious to himself that he is the soldier of God the 
Just — a consciousness which it well beseems all soldiers and all men to have 
always — armed soldier, terrible as death, relentless as doom; doing God's judg- 
ments on the enemies of God ! It is a phenomenon not of joyful nature ; no, 
but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe." 



570 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

lished Church had been too remote from the Long Parliament 
for the actual abolition of its episcopacy. Some of its clergy 
had joined the Covenanters. Its intense royalism did not suit 
Cromwell. The liturgy was repressed. But some of its most 
heroic clergy used it during all his time. He granted pensions 
to several bishops, especially the non-resident Ussher. (3) The 
Presbyterians had flourished in Ulster during the covenanting 
years. They had adopted the Westminster standards. They 
were sincere monarchists. Their presbytery sent forth a dec- 
laration,* strong and severe, in which they denounced "the 
insolencies of the sectarian party in England," and the execu- 
tion of the king as "an act so horrible as no history, divine 
or human, ever had a precedent to the like." They had the 
Covenant renewed in their churches the next Sabbath. Those 
who refused were brought under discipline. A colonel who 
subscribed only the moral part of it was required to acknowl- 
edge his sin and offense publicly, and tear out his qualification. 
The ministers were in this mood when one of Cromwell's gen- 
erals required their names to the engagement for the common- 
wealth. A few qualifiedly signed it. The rest pleaded con- 
science and Covenant, and refused. A prison did not bring 
them to terms. They were told that "they must be gone." 
Some of them went to Scotland. A heroic twenty-four, dressed 
as laymen, slipped about among their parishioners, rarely lodged 
at home, won favor as honest men, preached in barns and glens, 
prayed always for "the lawful magistrate," and hoped for royal 
times. Better times came without the royalty, and one of their 
knights thus gave the reason: "For Oliver, coming to the 
supreme ordering of affairs [1653], did not force any engage- 
ment or promise upon people contrary to their conscience, 
knowing that forced obligations of that kind will bind no 
man. . . . Thus ministers in the country began to enjoy 
great liberty in their ministry, and their brethren in Scotland 
began to return in peace to their parishes." Henry Cromwell, 
acting for his father, was firm, just, conciliatory to all Protest- 
ants. Although presbytery was not openly allowed, its eighty 
ministers retained their Church sessions, received aid from the 

*In imitation of "the worthy ministers of the province of London," who 
published their protest ten days after the king's death. Milton officially an- 
swered the Irish declaration with needless sarcasm. 



THE POLICY IN SCOTLAND. 571 

civil government, organized new Churches in several counties, 
and joyed in their prosperity. (4) Cromwell made earnest efforts 
to supply Ireland with preachers, such as he thought were godly 
men, more intent on practical Christianity than upon Churchism. 
The trouble was to find evangelical men, who were in sympathy 
with his toleration and republicanism. Among the volunteers 
who came were Quakers. They got a foothold, but were 
roughly handled.* Most of the one hundred and fifty minis- 
ters who were allowed stipends were Baptists, nearly all of them 
tradesmen, mechanics, army officers, with discordant theologies. 
The more learned of them planted no enduring Churches. The 
independents were quite largely and more ably represented, 
while John Owen and Stephen Charnocke remained. Under 
the protectorate Ireland prospered as never before, socially, civ- 
illy, in farming and trading, in wealth and peace. 

2. The policy t7i Scotland. By acts running from February, 
1645, through four years, the General Assembly and Parliament 
of Scotland had joyfully adopted the Westminster formularies, 
each as "a part of the covenanted uniformity." The immense 
fact in the civil and religious history of the Scots, through forty 
longer years, is their absorbing devotion to the international 
covenant. It did not stand alone. It carried with it a system 
of theology and Church polity, and the Protesters long insisted 
that the three kingdoms were morally and politically bound to 
adopt the entire system, and put down every thing in conflict 
with it. They sincerely felt that the Lord had entered into 
that Covenant with his peculiar people. On its basis he was 
supposed to govern the British Isles and dispense his mercies 
and judgments. By it they urged "the crown-rights of the 
Redeemer" and the liberties of the Church. It explains the 
almost theocratic position of their divines in all affairs, even 
military. It was made a test of admission to the Gospel min- 
istry, to the Lord's Supper, to the best social privileges, and 
to civil rights. Even a more rigid test was applied, by the 



* The Journal of their Irish apostle, an Antrim trader who traveled over 
all the British Isles and in America, for his faith, was read by John Wesley with 
this comment: "His opinions I leave; but what a spirit was there! What 
faith, love, gentleness, long-suffering! Could mistakes send such a man to hell? 
Not so. ... I scruple not to say, ' Let my soul be with the soul of Win. 
Edmundson!'" (Wesley, Journal in Ireland.) 



572 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

strictest party, to civil and military services.* It rang out in 
the war-cry, "For Christ's Crown and Covenant." It made 
heroes. It was to have its noble army of martyrs. Its enemy 
was treated as the enemy of Scotland and of God. The sup- 
porters of Argyle righteously scorned the advances of that brill- 
iant anti-covenanter, Montrose, when he returned in the interest 
of Prince Charles, for he sought to give them a king without 
the covenant, and with a liturgy. He was seized and hanged 
at Edinburgh. 

They could forgive the house of Stuart if the prince would 
be their covenanted king. He made the promise. They pro- 
claimed him. They invited him to Scotland. In June, 1650, 
on an anchored ship not far from Aberdeen, he swore to the 
great Covenant. A Frenchman said : ' ' They compelled him to 
adopt it voluntarily." His forwardness in the matter surprised, 
but did not quite satisfy, the good divines wjio took him in 
charge for a much-needed spiritual and Presbyterian training. 
He landed. He heard their sermons — six on one fast-day — 
closely aimed at the Stuart iniquities. The General Assembly 
arranged "to congratulate his home-coming and to motion his 
renewing of the Covenant." They suspected that one oath was 
not enough to bind a Stuart of that epoch. He was still too 
profane and too fond of his roistering companions. He must 
sign a declaration of profound sorrow for his father's deadly 
opposition to the Covenant and his mother's papal idolatry and 
of deep sincerity in all his oaths. Before he shall be brought 
to that point they will be devising measures against that so- 
called "army of sectaries and blasphemers," marching north 
under the chief layman of the Independents, who are saying in 
London that any man able to see as far as a bat at noon ' ' may 
well judge that Charles Stuart loves the Covenant as well as a 
Scotch presbyter loves a bishop." 



* A leading Protester, Rev. James Guthrie, when executed by the agents of 
Charles II, in 1661, said of the Covenants: "These sacred, public oaths of 
God ... are still binding upon these kingdoms, and will be so forever 
hereafter." He spoke for his party. While the Protesters controlled the Gen- 
eral Assembly, their Act of Classes, 1 649, debarred four classes of men, especially 
malignants and engagers, however patriotic or wise, from civil and military 
services. By it Parliament and the army were purged. Scores of officers and 
thousands of soldiers, eager to resist Cromwell, were ejected. Military defeats 
were ascribed to a defective expurgation of "ungodly malignants." 



BATTLE OF DUNBAR. 573 

Cromwell* struck for Edinburgh. Never had he such a 
month of failure as that of August, 1650, with defeat at the 
walls and starvation on the hills. He fell back to Dunbar and 
seemed to be entrapped. But Leslie's twenty thousand Cove- 
nanters rashly assailed half as many Ironsides, and were utterly 
wrecked. This victory gave Southern Scotland to the common- 
wealth. The north held out for the prince, who was crowned 
king the next January. During the war Charles suddenly 
dashed into England, hopeful that the men of Lancashire would 
rise in his cause. He rode into Worcester with only sixteen 
thousand soldiers, saw Cromwell with thirty thousand republi- 
cans at the walls, fought bravely on the fatal day (September 
3d), escaped in the disguise of a peasant, and became an exile 
on the Continent for eight and a half years. Cromwell wrote 
of the victory: ''It is, for aught I know, a crowning mercy." 
It assured to the commonwealth the mastery of all the British 
dominions, and a friendly recognition by nearly all the European 
powers. 

What was Cromwell's policy toward the kirk and state of 
Scotland? While he was there the leading ministers certainly 
did not fail in any conscious duty of rebuking him as a cove- 
nant-breaker and provoker of divine judgments. Nor did he 
fail in sharp replies : "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, 
think it possible you may be mistaken." Their mistake was 
in thinking that he had come to break down presbytery, to 
give "the Sectaries" a boundless toleration, and not simply to 
abolish covenanted Stuartism. When the last thing was so well 
done as to deserve a national thanksgiving, and General Monk 
was left to keep political order, they were surprised at the 
moderation of the conqueror. He claimed that he was pro- 
moting "the real ends of the Covenant," the mutual liberties 
of the Church and the state. For the first time Scotland was 
organically united to England, and with many beneficial results 
to her civil welfare. 

The kirk lost one liberty. The loss may be traced to the 
distressing feud between her sons. One party was deposing 
the radical ministers of the other, yet none would stay deposed. 
Which side would Cromwell take? The Westland Whigs, 

* Lord Fairfax had declined to go and thrown up his commission. This 
left Cromwell to be commander-in-chief. 



574 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

never lured into covenanted Stuartism, were a link between him 
and the Protesters or remonstrants who had been most severe 
upon him. He remembered Argyle, and favored mainly the 
strict party ; as Carlyle puts it, ' ' He favored, above all things, 
the Christian- Gospel party, who had some good message in them 
for the soul of man." Its preachers, now a minority, were 
regarded as more spiritual by many of the people who crowded 
to their services. With them began the sacramental fasts, with 
an almost unbroken series of sermons for three or four days, 
every month, and with the most devout covenanting. The 
Resolutioners had excellent ministers, more of them, more lib- 
eral in policy, and equally sound in theology.* But they did 
not think that piety was absolutely essential to patriotism. 
They highly valued both, and were all covenanters. They 
would not cease to pray for the king. They controlled the 
General Assembly of 1652, when the Remonstrants protested 
against its lawfulness, and were threatened with discipline if they 
did not withdraw their protest. The next year the assembly 
met, but Colonel Cotterel, with his troops, ordered the mem- 
bers to go home and never meet again. It did not meet again 
for thirty-seven years. This was their one lost liberty under 
Cromwell. Both parties deplored it, but were not reconciled. 
One of their historians says of their fierce controversy: "It put 
ill blood into our Church-life, which a century and a half did 
not expel." 

Hetherington says: "No further violence was used by Crom- 
well against the Church of Scotland. . . . No other part 
of Church government and discipline experienced the slightest 
interruption; or rather, every other part was thrown into more 
intense and vigorous action. The whole vitality of the king- 



* Out of the confusion we may form this group: 1st. The Hamiltonian 
Engagers, who won control of the General Assembly in 1651, and by a resolu- 
tion of the kirk commission gained the repeal of the Act of Classes, became 
the Resolutioners. Among them were Revs. Baillie, David Dickson, and Robert 
Douglas. 2d. The leading Protesters and Whigs remonstrated against the repeal 
on the grounds that the Act was the safeguard of their liberties, and that the 
kirk commission exceeded its authority: and they became the Remonstrants. 
Among them were Lord Warriston, Revs. James Guthrie, Samuel Rutherford, 
Principal Gillespie, and John Livingstone. 3d. The Middle or Peace Party, led 
by Revs. James Durham and Robert Blair, whose special effort, in 1656, ended 
thus: "All means that the skill of man could invent were essayed, but in vain." 



SCOTTISH CLERGY. 575 

dom seemed to be poured into the heart of the Church, and all 
the strong energies of the Scottish mind were directed to relig- 
ious topics in a more exclusive manner than they had ever 
previously been." The ministers of both parties engaged less 
in politics. They had few debates with the Independent, Bap- 
tist, and Quaker preachers, who gathered hearers about the 
English garrisons. They advanced their own cause with marked 
earnestness and ability. Much of their Biblical and theological 
literature is still highly valued. Many of them were deep, as 
well as devout thinkers ; genial, large-hearted neighbors ; hard- 
working pastors, rearing metaphysicians on the catechism, and 
heroes for the coming battle with the truthless king for whom 
they prayed; and saintly divines who might yet be willing to 
take the stool of penance, then found in the kirks for common 
offenders, if that could wipe out their mistake in trusting and 
recalling him. Cromwell was their greatest human friend, and 
some of them knew it, when he sent Rutherford to teach theol- 
ogy at St. Andrews, and gave a similar chair at Glasgow to 
Patrick Gillespie, the Whig preacher who stood quite alone in 
praying aloud for the protector. 

''This seems to me to have been Scotland's high noon," 
says the chronicler, Parson Kirkton, whose coloring has paled 
somewhat before the actual records, yet has outlines of facts in 
the Lowlands. ' ' Every parish had a minister, every village 
had a school, every family almost had a Bible. . . . Aged 
men and women went to school, so as to read the Scriptures." 
Not so much profane swearing in Kirkton's parish as Cromwell 
had reported about Edinburgh. "Nobody complained of our 
Church government more than our taverners, whose ordinary 
lamentation was, their trade was broken, people were become 
so sober." Fair waiters in grog-shops not so common as form- 
erly. The peasants were theoretically released from feudalism ; 
thousands of people were actually set free from a worse bond- 
age. "I verily believe," says Kirkton, "there were more souls 
converted to Christ in that short time than in any season since 
the Reformation." Nothing else more clearly shows the divine 
favor, and Scotland's debt of gratitude, to the men of the 
Covenant. 

3. The policy in England and Wales. The remnant of the 
Long Parliament became selfish, unjust, and intent upon voting 



576 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

itself perpetual. It might recall the royalist members, and 
then the exiled Charles. In April, 1653, Cromwell and his 
military council expelled it. The nation rejoiced. Men of 
business looked hopefully to the dictator. His plan of govern- 
ing the British Isles by an assembly of about one hundred and 
fifty men, chosen for their godliness, lasted one month. When 
the bare majority of radicals were about to sweep away Church 
patronage and tithes, and adopt the voluntary principle of 
Church support, Cromwell secured their resignations.* A 
council of military officers and civilians, in December, 1653, 
brought in a written constitution which made him Lord Pro- 
tector. It required Parliaments. Two were summoned (1654- 
56), but they ran against his will, or wisdom, and each was 
roughly dissolved. So that Cromwell was the actual ruler of 
Britain for five years, aiming to be a protector of the ancient 
freedom and of all the popular liberties which had been gained 
by the revolution. The higher classes had long sought the free- 
dom of making laws ; he wished all ranks of society to have the 
freedom of living happily under the best laws that were made. 
Edmund Burke has said, "The government of Cromwell was, 
to be sure, somewhat rigid ; but for a new power, no savage 
tyranny. The laws, in general had their course, and were ad- 
mirably administered." The protector, with royalists plotting 
against him, and even assassins on his path, was less severe 
than the Rump Parliament had been in punishing men for com- 
plicity with insurgent Stuartists. The heavier restraints were 
laid on the Anglican clergy, and in 1655 they were threatened 
with hard punishment if their sermons and prayers continued 
to be seditious. When they grew more respectful to the one 
man who kept the poor Stuart out of England, they had more 
liberty. Evelyn tells how gladly he attended their liturgical 
services in private houses in London. At Oxford, three hun- 
dred Anglicans met regularly without any disturbance. Else- 
where there was no active repression of their meetings, when 

*This was the Barebones Parliament, so named from Praise-God Barbon, a 
leather merchant, and leading Baptist of London. In it for the first time 
members for England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales sat together. It has been 
ridiculed as a house of fanatics. But in it were men wise enough to propose 
measures which, in our century, have been enacted for the relief of debtors, 
limitation of capital punishment to murder and treason; prison reforms, and 
speedier trials in courts. Its members were largely Independents and Baptists. 



THE PROTECTOR— A COMMITTEE OF TRIERS. 577 

they were not suspected of conspiracy. The protector had no 
flattery, nor much' favor, in the sermons and prayers of the 
sturdy Presbyterians.* 

Cromwell aimed at a Church policy which would heal divis- 
ions, and not perpetuate sects. He desired the comprehension 
of all evangelical Christians in an establishment, with the old 
revenues, with a simple creed, and without prelacy and liturgy; 
also, safe toleration to all dissenters. The people were not in- 
clined to such a plan. He said, " I have had some boxes and 
rebukes on the one hand and on the other ; some censuring me 
for presbytery, others as an inletter to all the sects and heresies 
of the nation. . . . Here is a great deal of truth among 
professors, but very little mercy. When we are brought into 
the right way, we shall be merciful as well as orthodox." The 
results of his efforts may be thus outlined : 

(1) A Committee of Triers, chosen from different counties, 
and consisting of twenty-nine ministers and nine laymen, exam- 
ined all candidates for the parishes of England and Wales. 
The design was to restrain the existing irregularities. In it 
were Presbyterians, more Independents, and a few Baptists and 
Episcopalians. Any five could approve, and any earnest Prot- 
estant who would preach the Gospel and conduct public wor- 
ship without liturgy and prelacy might continue in his charge, 
or receive a new appointment. Thomas Fuller and George 
Bull, defender of the Nicene Creed, were among the Anglicans 
who chose to submit to the rule, rather than desert their flocks. 
There was also a Committee of Ejectors. Baxter thought that 
six-sevenths of those turned out were guilty of such sins as 
drunkenness and profane swearing ; also, that most of the min- 
isters retained were so faithful that many thousands of souls 
blessed God for them. It has been said by disinterested wri- 
ters, that the Church of Christ never possessed abler or purer 
ministers than those of the commonwealth, or men who gave 
themselves up with greater ardor to the work to which they 

*John Livingstone, in London, 1654, prayed thus before the protector: 
"God be gracious to him [Charles] whose right it is to rule in this place, and 
is unjustly thrust from it. . . . Let our prayers come forth in the appointed 
time, for doing him and his family good. As for these poor men [Cromwell and 
cabinet] that now fill his room, Lord be merciful to them." It was not Crom- 
well, but Charles II, who banished Livingstone, so that his last ten years (to 
1672) were spent in Holland. 

37 



578 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

had consecrated themselves. They gave a new character to the 
religious life of the country. Nor were they the demure, sad- 
faced, splenetic race which figure in certain overdrawn histories. 
The best of them had their pleasantries at home, and often a 
dash of sacred wit in their sermons. They did most to make 
their age decent, until they were ousted by Stuartists who made 
it dissolute. 

(2) The Presbyterial system was scarcely disturbed in the 
provinces of London and Lancashire. 

(3) In other counties the moderate Presbyterians and Inde- 
pendents united in associations on a plan which suited Baxter 
and Owen. All evangelical, upright ministers, coming into the 
arrangements thus far noticed, drew support from the revenues 
of the Establishment. Both the presbyterial and congrega- 
tional forms of Church government were allowed. 

(4) The schools and university chairs were filled by men 
whom the Triers approved. John Owen certainly did not de- 
grade the scholarship of Oxford while he was its vice-chancellor. 

(5) Papists, prelatists, and Unitarians were not allowed to 
proclaim openly their distinctive views, but they were not 
hunted down for their quiet opinions. If any sects were not 
allowed liberty of peaceable worship, it was because their wild 
deeds endangered the public safety. Even the Ranters, who 
set up the light of nature as the Christ in man, were quite safe 
in their own conventicles. The press had never been so free in 
Britain. The Jews, excluded for about three centuries, were 
readmitted into England. The general rule was the toleration 
of opinions. 

The foreign policy gave England a high rank among the 
nations. A great Protestant league was planned. One effort 
was to secularize politics and war, by first securing religious 
rights. " Cromwell was courted by all the powers of Europe, 
and the star of the Stuarts seemed to have set forever." Blind 
Milton's pen was mighty in the defense and relief of the Wal- 
denses. England lost this position by the death of Oliver 
Cromwell, in September, 1658, and by the dissensions of par- 
ties. He had not won the heart and loyalty of the nation to 
the Republic. His eldest son, Richard, had not the genius to 
control the divided republicans, nor to unite the officers of 
the army. They set up the old Rump Parliament, and to it he 



GEORGE MONK— THE RESTORATION. . 579 

resigned the protectorate. These acts thickened the confusion. 
Royalists of every kind were joining hands. The English Pres- 
byterians had the balance of power, and they lost a grand 
chance of saving the Free Commonwealth and themselves, 
when they opposed the republicans. Milton had said to them. 
1 ■ Woe to you, first of all, if ever the progeny of Charles shall 
recover the kingdom !" But they relied on the word of the 
second Charles, who was secretly promising every party what- 
ever it asked. They co-operated with the Anglicans and the 
Scottish Resolutioners. 

England was almost in civil war, when General George Monk 
stepped to the front as the chief actor in the drama. He was 
"cold-blooded and taciturn, zealous for no polity and for no 
religion," audacious in lying, and able to deceive the very elect. 
The leading Scots evidently knew his errand when he left them. 
He marched south with his troops. On his way he had the 
support of Lord Fairfax, who decided the fate of England by 
drawing to him the regiments of the republican Lambert, in 
Yorkshire. The Independent wing of the army was foiled ; the 
Anglican and Presbyterian wings of it were in power. In Feb- 
ruary, 1660, Monk was in royalist London with his army, and 
master of the realm. There he plainly declared himself for 
a free Parliament. The city was joyous with bell-ringings 
and bonfires. Presbyterian members, long ago expelled by 
Colonel Pride, entered the old Parliament, and dissolved it by 
their votes. In the new Parliament, or Convention, the Pres- 
byterians were so strong as to hope for the settlement of mon- 
archy on the basis of the Solemn League and Covenant, with a 
toleration of moderate episcopacy. But on this point they 
failed, and yet they could not read their doom. In the Decla- 
ration of Breda Charles offered a general pardon to all whom 
Parliament did not specially except, and freedom of religion to 
all who did not disturb the peace of the kingdom. He was 
called to the throne without sufficient guarantees to popular 
liberty. On his thirtieth birthday, May 29, 1660, he entered 
London. 

4. The Restoration. It was twofold: that of Charles to the 
British throne, and that of the Anglican Church to its former' 
Establishment .* Duped men soon had their eyes opened. Sir 

* There was also the restoration of court vices. See Note III. 



580 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Harry Vane and the Marquis of Argyle, with others less known, 
found no royal pardon ; they were executed for alleged treason. 
Pastors and university professors who did not conform to Epis- 
copacy, soon found no liberty to hold benefices. The canons 
of Laud's time were applied to many of them. If they did not 
use the liturgy, parishioners could bring suit against them. 
It is a mistake to date the ejections with the St. Bartholomew 
of 1662, for that was the culmination of a gradual process. 
Scarcely was the king on his throne when Independents and 
Baptists were ousted in Wales, and they, along with Quak- 
ers, were imprisoned. In 1660 John Bunyan was flung into 
Bedford jail, and Philip Henry arraigned for not reading the 
Common Prayer. These are but samples. Baxter, who had 
never been a republican, was so alarmed that he sent an address 
to Charles, entreating that "the king would never undo the 
good which Cromwell and others had done." His plan of 
Comprehension, like that of Ussher, did not please the bish- 
ops.* Chancellor Clarendon's scheme for the toleration of dis- 
senters did not suit the Presbyterians, who knew that the half- 
popish and sensual king would let in the papists. For months 
the Presbyterians were favored and coaxed. The only man of 
them who accepted a bishopric was Dr. Edward Reynolds. 
Baxter declined one. A few conformed sufficiently to retain 
their parishes. The most heroic of them girded themselves 
for hard endurance, when the hangman burnt the Solemn 
League and Covenant, May 22, 1661, by order of the Cavalier 
Parliament, f 

This Parliament, with no lack of prelatic advice, reversed 
the covenanting times. It passed act after act against the Puri- 
tans, who refused to conform, and became dissenters. On St. 
Bartholomew's day, 1662, about two thousand ministers, chiefly 
Presbyterians and Independents, were ejected from their livings 
with no allowance for their support, not even the tithes nearly 



*On a colossal monument at Kidderminster are these words: "Between the 
years 1641 and 1660 this town was the scene of the labors of Richard Baxter, 
renowned equally for his Christian learning and his pastoral fidelity. In a stormy 
and divided age he advocated unity and comprehension, pointing the way to 
'everlasting rest.' Churchmen and Non-conformists united to raise this memo- 
rial, A. D. 1875." 

f The English history is here traced into the next period: that of the Scots 
will come in Chapter XXIII. 



NOTES TO CHAPTER XXI. 58 1 

due them. The Conventicle Act of 1664 forbade all their 
meetings for worship. Next year the Five Mile Act punished 
them for living within five miles of any corporate town, or 
teaching a school. An Anglican has said that "the Act of 
Uniformity cast out many of the best fish from the net ; all the 
bad, all the unscrupulous, might abide in it unmolested." An- 
other ascribes to it, " in some measure, that decay of godliness 
which the succeeding age lamentably attested." Baxter says 
that ' ' hundreds of able ministers, with their wives and children, 
had neither house nor bread. The jealousy of the state and 
the malice of their enemies were so great that the people who 
were willing, durst not be known to give to their ejected pas- 
tors," lest they should be accused of aiding schism and plotting 
insurrections. One was turned out of doors because he could 
not pay his house rent ; another spun thread to earn a sup- 
port. "God did mercifully provide some supplies, so that few 
either perished, or were exposed to sordid, unseemly beggary." 

Most of these ministers would accept no toleration which 
brought liberty to the papists. Hence they refused the indul- 
gence offered by Charles, in 1672, and that of King James 
(1685-8), who. was an avowed Romanist. James seemed to 
favor religious freedom when fifteen hundred Quakers were 
released from prisons, and eight thousand Protestants were 
relieved of penalties upon non-conformity. Dissenters now 
found a surer basis for denominational existence. They grew 
in numbers and reared hundreds of chapels in England. 

The great revolution had passed through its first stage and 
been checked by the Stuart Restoration. It was cast down, 
but not destroyed, by the gross immoralities brought in by 
Charles, and the Romanizing spirit of James. Its second stage 
will come when William of Orange shall sail into England and 
restore what was best in the commonwealth of Cromwell. 



NOTES. 

I. Names of the three parties in the Westminster Assembly : 1. Presby- 
terian. This title refers strictly to a Church polity and not to a theology. 
It was not applied to the adherents of this party where they were known as 
"the Reformed Churches" of different countries, as of France or Scotland. 
But where they appeared as a party, or sect, or denomination, as in Eng- 



582 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

land and Ireland, they were called Presbyterians. Thus the name passed 
to America. It now covers several Reformed Churches in Europe, and 
some in America, which are not purely Calvinistic. 2. Independe7it. In 
the Assembly "the five dissenting brethren" objected to being called Inde- 
pendents, for the term might include various sects. It came to be applied 
to all the Calvinistic Congregationalists of Britain. 3. Erastian. Thomas 
Erastus (Lieber, 1524-83), of Heidelberg, gave name to the theory that 
pastors are simply teachers, not rulers ; that the Church, as a spiritual body, 
has no right to inflict censures; that as an external organization she is a 
department or mode of the state; hence ecclesiastical offenders are to be 
punished as citizens by the civil power. Erastianism came to mean any 
supremacy of the state over the Church. 

II. Parliament ordered (October, 1645) that a person suspended from 
the Lord's Supper might carry an appeal through the Church courts to 
Parliament. The last step was called Erastian by the assembly, as it took 
from the Church the power of making its own discipline a finality. "This," 
wrote Baillie, "has been the only impediment why presbyteries and synods 
have not been erected; for the ministers refuse to accept of presbyteries 
without this power." This was true of the thorough Presbyterians. But 
the majority of English ministers thought that the whole business of coven- 
anted uniformity was still more Erastian, as it was enjoined and enforced 
by Parliament. Yet, if they must have presbytery, they wanted some check 
upon its ecclesiastical courts. They were born with the idea that Parliament 
had the right to judge such cases of appeal. The tendency in England was 
Erastian ; in Scotland it was theocratic, for the kirk practically directed the 
civil power, although the Scots held that the Church and state were widely 
different institutions. 

III. Taine (Eng. Lit.) says of the Stuart Restoration: "The violent 
return to the senses drowned morality. In this great reaction, devotion 
and honesty, swept away together, left to mankind but the wreck and the 
mire. The more excellent parts of human nature disappeared; there 
remained but the animal, without bridle or guide, urged by his desires 
beyond justice and shame. ... It was the fashion to swear, to relate 
scandalous anecdotes, to get drunk, to gamble, to prate against preachers 
and Scripture. . . . These people were misanthropic and became mo- 
rose; they quote the gloomy Hobbes, and he is their master." The theaters, 
which Parliament had closed, were reopened, and the roisterers, led by 
Dryden and attaining a disgusting coarseness in Wycherley, made manifest 
the decay of purity and the fall of genius. The great plague and fire 
(1665-6) scarcely checked the rioting. 



Period VI 



NATIONAL .CHURCHES AND DENOMINATIONS. 

a. m. ieeo— 1878. 

THE CRISIS OF PROTESTANTISM BY THE SCHEMES OF LOUIS XIV — PROTESTANT- 
ISM GRADUALLY FREED FROM POLITICS AND WAR — PROGRESS THROUGH 
TOLERATION TO RELIGIOUS LIBERTY — FREE THOUGHT IN DEISM, CRITICAL 
RATIONALISM, SKEPTICAL^ PHILOSOPHY, AND THEORETICAL SCIENCE — REVI- 
VALS OF SPIRITUALITY — METHODISM — GREAT REVOLUTIONS — CIVIL AND 
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN AMERICA — ADVANCE OF CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY 
IN EUROPE — MISSIONS — ACTIVITY OF THE LAITY IN CHRISTIAN WORK — THE 
NEW AGE OF SCIENCE AND INVENTIONS — SOCIETIES FOR MORAL REFORM — A 
SPIRIT OF UNION AMONG PROTESTANTS. 



Chapter XXII. 

PROTESTANTISM IN EUROPE. 

1600-1878. 

When Louis XIV assumed absolute power in France and 
said "the state is myself," religion was again involved in war 
and politics. The period of his fifty-four remaining years 
(1661-1715) was the Augustan age of French literature, art, 
science, and glory; but it was the Decian age to French Jan- 
senists and Huguenots. It brought European Protestantism to 
a new crisis. He began it with great powers and lofty notions 
of kingship by divine right, but he had no personal morality, 
no fidelity to his wife, no regard for national treaties, no prac- 
tical religion. For years his court was profligate. His chief 
aims were absolutism on the throne, the grandeur of France, 
and her unity in religion, the supremacy over Western Europe, 
and possession of the crowns of Spain and the empire. He 
asserted the old Gallican liberties. While at strife with popes 

533 



584 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

he was the political champion of Romanism. A general view 
of Europe, from 1661 to 1697, will show the critical state of 
Protestant affairs. 

I. The Crisis of Protestantism. 

In France the papal clergy had already secured harsh 
measures against the Protestants. The art was to take gradu- 
ally from two millions of Huguenots, the rights and privileges 
which the Edict of Nantes declared irrevocable. Their national 
synod, which had met last in 1660, was not again permitted. 
During fifteen years they were deprived of one liberty after 
another, until certain trades and kinds of labor were closed 
against them, their schools forbidden, and half of their Churches 
suppressed. They were learning the roads to exile. France 
was losing industry and wealth. Persecution was not a wise 
policy for the king; he must use the plea of conscience. Nei- 
ther the Jesuit casuistry of Father La Chaise nor the eloquence 
of Bossuet had roused that faculty in behalf of Church unity. 
The so-called conversion of the king, and whatever reform there 
was of him and his court, were mainly due to Madame de Main- 
tenon,* once a Protestant, but now a zealot for the Roman faith, 
and yet to be his wife by a secret marriage. In 1676 her influ- 
ence, with that of the famous preacher, Bourdaloue, began to 
tell. The king now pleaded, or pretended, conscience in his 
persecutions. A large fund was raised for the conversion of the 
Huguenots, and used in buying and bribing them. Their ruin 
was more certain by means of the Dragonnades (168 1), or the 
plan of quartering dragoons of soldiers in towns, to lodge with 
Huguenot families, devour their substance, annoy them, force 
them to conform, and answer to no law for their outrages. The 
cruel edicts reached their highest point, in 1685, with the rev- 
ocation of the Edict of Nantes. The reason given was, ' ' It 
remains useless, since the better and greater part of the pre- 
tended Reformed have embraced Catholicism.'' A monstrous 
lie ! The papal and Spanish courts expressed abhorrence of 
these cruel measures. 

All Huguenot pastors were ordered to leave the kingdom 
in fifteen days, or be sent as slaves to the galleys. But their 
people must remain, for even the right of fleeing into exile 

* Frances, granddaughter of the Huguenot T. A. D ' Aubigne. 



CRISIS OF PROTESTANTISM. 585 

was denied them. Troops were posted on the roads and fron- 
tiers to prevent any from escaping, and those who had gone 
were ordered to return ! Thus the quietest people, the best 
farmers and artisans, in France were left with no rights or 
liberties. Despite the most stringent measures, about eight 
hundred thousand of them managed to escape, during the next 
ten years, and find welcome in other lands. In Germany and 
Holland they restored life to cities almost depopulated by wars. 
There and in England and Ireland they became the best man- 
ufacturers. In America, and even at the Cape of Good Hope 
in Africa, they were prosperous colonists. They built churches 
in foreign cities ; and such exiled pastors as Saurin, Lenfant, 
and Beausobre won distinction in Christian literature. These 
dispersed Huguenots told their touching story with voice and 
pen. They roused Europe against a king who had yet "to 
sit thirty years longer on his throne, and bear the burden of 
his crime." 

Meanwhile the power of Louis threatened Protestantism in 
other lands. His military successes were dreaded by the Wal- 
denses, and by the reformed Churches of Switzerland and of 
all the Rhine countries.* In England there was a shameful 
truculence to the French king. Charles II wanted money ; 
Louis granted it freely, and dictated the terms, one of which 
was that Romanism must have freer course in the British Isles. 
Charles did for it all that he dared; and when dying, in 1685, 
received absolution from a Roman priest. More boldness was 
to be expected from James II, for he was an avowed papist. 
His real advisers were a council of Jesuists and Romanist peers. 
When Huguenot refugees were treading the streets of London, 
and collections for them were taken in the English churches, 
James forbade the clergy to censure the conduct and character 
of the French king. Jesuits and monks opened schools in 
London. Pamphlets in defense of Romanism were widely cir- 
culated. Rosaries and crucifixes were publicly sold under royal 
patronage. Chapels were built. Roman priests gained a foot- 



* Complicated wars brought distress to the Protestants of Germany, Poland, 
Bohemia, and Hungary. The Emperor Leopold, in 1674, oppressed the Hun- 
garians ; two hundred and fifty Protestant preachers were banished, slain, 
or sold as slaves in the galleys of Naples. His son, Joseph, granted them tol- 
eration, and joined the league against Louis XIV. 



586 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ing at Oxford. James offered an indulgence to all non-con- 
formists, putting them and the Romanists on the same level. 
Few of them were deceived into the scheme. The stout Whigs 
kept him from many acts of tyranny. The Scots were once 
more groaning under prelacy, and they feared that popery was 
coming. The papal clergy had returned to Ireland, and soon 
there were three thousand priests and a dozen bishops there 
against five hundred Anglican ministers. The government and 
army were in the hands of papists. Ireland was rapidly falling 
from prosperity into wretchedness, and James seemed bent 
upon rooting Protestantism out of it. Many Presbyterians 
were sailing for America. The pope looked for a restoration 
of the papal system, in all Britain. But he knew not the tem- 
per of the sturdier British Protestants. They had experienced 
enough of Stuartism. They were weary of a king who took 
money from Louis to undermine their religion and liberties. 
They knew where a better one might be found. They shouted 
when a jury cleared the seven bishops who were arraigned for 
not reading the king's last indulgence. The soldiers exulted in 
the acquittal. "This prosecution united all classes in opposi- 
tion to the government. The great majority of the peers, both 
lay and spiritual, the universities, the clergy, the dissenters, 
the army, the landed gentry, the merchants — all, in short, who 
called themselves Protestants — were firmly knit together to 
oppose the king and his Romish advisers." * They felt a keen 
hostility to Louis XIV. Seven patriots went over to Holland 
with an invitation to the Prince of Orange, who was now the 
center of unity against the king of France. 

William of Orange f had brought the Dutch Republic out 
of anarchy, and become its president. Louis had made a war 
of six years (1672-8) upon it. Rather than submit to him, 
the people had resolved "to open their dykes, to man their 
ships, to leave their country, with all its miracles of art and 
industry, its cities, its canals, its villas, its pastures, and its 
tulip-gardens, buried under the waves of the German Ocean, 
and bear to a distant climate their Calvinistic faith and their 



♦Hale, "Fall of the Stuarts," p. 129. 

fBorn 1650; son of Stadtholder William II and Mary, the daughter of 
Charles I of England. In 1667 he married Mary, the daughter of James II 
of England. 



THE GRAND ALLIANCE. $§7 

old Batavian liberties." They did burst the dykes; the lands 
were flooded ; the French retreated in haste ; and the Peace of 
Nimwegen, 1678, secured to the republic its independence, and 
to its young president the confidence of Protestant Europe. 
Thenceforth he was the one powerful man in the way of Louis. 
Cool, far-sighted, bold in his designs and persistent in execut- 
ing them, Calvinistic in faith, with a large belief in freedom, 
he battled diplomatically with the French king for the control 
of Europe. Each was intent upon binding England to his 
cause. Louis had the Stuarts on his side ; William gained the 
people. Louis flung himself into a war upon Germany ; Will- 
iam was invited by "the seven patriots" to take the English 
crown. Ranke says that "resistance to Louis XIV had now 
become a European necessity; but it never could have been 
successful without the adhesion of Great Britain ;" and he 
thinks that William was moved to seize the English throne in 
order to rescue it from a popish king and ally it to the Protest- 
ant powers of Europe. 

In October, 1688, William sailed down the Channel, with an 
army, aided by "a Protestant wind," and landed at Torbay. 
The West of England declared for him. He pushed on towards 
London. James II fled to France. A convention was sum- 
moned. The next February William and Mary were the joint 
sovereigns of a nation which they had conquered without 
bloodshed. English freedom was saved. Anglican uniformity 
was lost forever. We shall elsewhere trace the results of the 
Toleration Act. 

Louis had ordered his generals to burn every town and 
village of the Palatinate. They made it almost a desert, and 
one hundred thousand families wandered by the light of their 
burning homes over the frozen fields, and perished, or found 
refuge in other lands. Some of them came to America. By 
this time the barbarities of Louis had caused a general horror. 
The German diet summoned all their states to vengeance, and 
he was denounced by the emperor, Leopold, as the enemy of 
all Christendom, and as deserving of a crusade as the Turk, 
who had just been driven out of Poland by the brave Sobieski. 
Against Louis, who sought to establish James II in Ireland, 
William organized the Grand Alliance (1689-90), in which were 
the emperor, Spain, Savoy, the German states, Holland, Eng- 



588 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

land, Denmark, and Sweden. In it were papal powers, fighting 
against Louis as the common enemy of mankind. Thus Will- 
iam was secularizing war and politics, and not merely saving 
Protestantism, but also political liberty. He conquered Ireland, 
and drove his father-in-law out of it. He fought hard and long 
on the Continent, and brought Louis to terms by the Peace of 
Ryswick, 1697, where each champion agreed not to foster 
rebellion in the country of the other, and William and Mary 
were recognized as the lawful sovereigns of Great Britain. To 
them England owes much of greatness and liberty. To Louis 
France has ascribed many of the poverties and sorrows of that 
age, and the national woes of the next century. He outraged 
humanity in the name of a faith ; he failed in the great pur- 
poses of his life ; he died amid a court full of unbelievers, 
and out of that infidelity sprang Voltaire and Rousseau. The 
Divine Providence was against him. His failure was a check 
upon the Roman Catholic reaction. He started the forces of 
that terrible movement, the French Revolution. 

From this time religion will be less involved in political 
struggles. Protestantism will be more separate from the secu- 
lar history of nations. We shall find two classes of Churches ; 
the established or national, and those not connected with the 
state. We shall now follow the lines of the religious Estab- 
lishments and leading denominations. 

II. The Protestants of France. 

Probably more than one million of Huguenots remained to 
endure the terrors of the Revocation, and of military inquisi- 
tion. Their bodies, books, Bibles, houses, churches, acade- 
mies, colleges, theological seminaries, the very toys of the 
children, were objects of violence. Boys and girls were per- 
suaded or forced into convents and training schools. Nuns 
and Jesuits converted them. Resistance was worse than use- 
less. Flight was next to impossible. "As patient as a Hu- 
guenot," became a proverb. It is estimated that fully two 
hundred thousand of them perished on the scaffold, in dun- 
geons, in the dragonnades, in the galleys, in butcheries by sol- 
diers whom they fed, by cold and fever and starvation. Against 
them were kings, parliaments, edicts, laws, bishops, priests, 
Jesuits, and armies for seventy years. Jansenists, and even the 



CLAUDE BROUSSON. 589 

Waldenses, were struck wherever the persecuting arm could 
reach them. And still the great body of them lived on chiefly 
in the mountains, forests, dens, and caves of the earth. In 
Languedoc and Cevennes they held their ' ' assemblies of the 
desert." Certain escaped pastors heard of these bold meetings, 
and crept back to their native land to perform their ministries. 
Their labors were full of romance and faith. They could not 
supply the demand for preaching, and they brought into the 
service the best men at hand, carpenters, weavers, and shep- 
herds. These pastors were marked for vengeance. Many 
of them suffered in prisons and died on scaffolds. The shots 
of a regiment often broke in upon the psalms of an unarmed 
assembly, and three or four hundred people lay dead among 
the rocks. The captains of these troops were often elegant 
gentlemen from the polished court of a king whose conscience 
Fenelon tried in vain to touch with humanity. 

Claude Brousson, a lawyer of Nismes, refused to sell his 
faith for a seat in the Parliament of Toulouse, defended the 
Huguenots at the bar until he saw that all pleadings were use- 
less, and then he devoted his eloquence to their cause in 
another way. He went into the Cevennes. While grape-shot 
were raking down his brethren he was ordained to preach. 
Now he suddenly enters a village, holds a meeting on the mount- 
ain-side, preaches, shakes a few hands, and hurries away to 
another band of faithful souls who will gather at midnight in a 
ravine to hear the good Word, which is dearer to them than their 
scanty bread. After wonderful toils and escapes he is tracked 
into Beam and arrested. The judges who see him tortured 
turn pale and tremble. The hangman, who has kept nerve 
while executing two hundred other men, would flee from his 
prayers if he could. But he performs the horrible service, and 
writes, " Certainly he died like a saint." In a few years all the 
ordained pastors were gone. Many of the lay teachers, men 
and women, became enthusiasts. In the retreats of the Ce- 
vennes there were fanatics, claiming to be inspired. Their 
dreams and visions were mingled wildly with Holy Scripture. 
They uttered their predictions of doom upon Rome and France. 
About ten thousand peasants took up arms and were the Cam- 
isards of a desolating war. Their five hundred villages were 
destroyed. Turretine, the famous theologian of Geneva, was 



590 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

obliged to explain that they did not represent true Protestant- 
ism. Yet they were human being's led by brave captains, such 
as Cavalier and Ravanel, and they deserved the aid sent to 
them from Holland and England. They failed in their des- 
perate effort ; but when Louis saw that foreign Protestants might 
take up their cause, he allowed his agents to be a little more 
humane. 

In France there were two spiritual dangers which thirty 
years of woe made evident. The uneducated, unordained 
preachers tended to fanaticism and such inspirations as those 
of the Camisards. Also more intelligent, timid, and wealthy 
Protestants, who had maintained their secret worship at their 
homes, were attending the Romanist churches to avoid sus- 
picion and for respectability. Between the excesses of the 
fervid and the concessions of the fearful the cause might be 
utterly lost. The man who brought the remedy was Antoine 
Court. Born in the Vivarais, in 1696, a child of the Church 
in the Desert, he had read the Bible, thought deeply upon its 
truth, and from the age of seventeen had been one of the 
preachers. He had the grace of strong sense, marvelous cour- 
age and endurance, true politeness and ready eloquence, 
prudence and the ability to win confidence. His plans and 
successes are indicated in the title since given him, "the Re- 
storer of the Protestantism of France." He did not take part 
with the enthusiasts. He began with little prayer-meetings 
wherever he could hold one. Long afterwards he wrote, ' ' It 
was a great thing, when by every sort of care and urgency I 
could induce six or a dozen persons to meet in some cave, or 
on a deserted grange, or in the fields, to worship God, and hear 
what I had to tell them. What a consolation it was, in 1744, 
to meet ten thousand people in those very spots where I 
once could gather only fifteen, thirty, sixty, or, at most, a 
hundred souls." 

Thus he was forming congregations. In 171 5 he held his 
first synod of six preachers and a few laymen. He restored 
the Bible to its proper place in their minds and ministries. 
He was only a layman. He sent one of them to Switzerland 
to be ordained, and from this man Court received ordination. 
The Church of the Desert was reorganized. Elders were 
appointed. Annually a synod was held in a cave or lonely 



JEAN CALAS. 59 1 

hut, anywhere to prevent discovery. The pastors itinerated ; 
rarely did one of them stay a week in one place. They 
assumed various names and all sorts of innocent disguises. 
The infidel Louis XV issued edicts still more terrible. His 
zeal disgusted his immoral courtiers. But the good work went 
on. Young men were ready to enter the Gospel ministry even 
in France. Court went to Lausanne in Switzerland, in 1730, 
founded a theological school, and during the remaining thirty 
years of his life trained men for the field-work in Southern 
France. Paul Rabaut was one of the heroic souls there edu- 
cated. He sometimes preached to ten thousand people. His 
voice began to be heard in the high places of civil life. It was 
part of his mission to secure more respect and sympathy for 
his people, and more lenience from the governors, one of 
whom often conferred with him. 

One event had a powerful effect. In 1762 the aged Jean 
Calas, once a merchant in Toulouse, had a son who joined the 
Roman Church, grew melancholy, and hanged himself. The 
priests buried the suicide with great display. The father was 
tried and executed on the unproved charge of having put his 
son to death for being a Romanist. Other members of the 
family were banished or sent into convents. Voltaire pub- 
lished an account of the whole affair, with a strong plea for 
toleration. The court of Toulouse reversed the sentence 
against Calas, for the brutal injustice was evident, and the 
judges must save themselves from the public indignation. The 
Protestants now assumed a bolder position. The Governor 
of Languedoc, confiding in Paul Rabaut, granted to them all 
that was possible under the laws, ignoring the severest edicts. 
In a few places there were outbreaks of violence against the 
reformed; the last meeting attacked was near Orange, in 1767, 
but the prisoners were ordered to be released. Dungeons 
began to be opened ; old men and women, who had spent 
more than half their lives in them, were set free. A son of 
Antoine Court, a fine scholar, had a powerful influence at 
Paris. Suddenly it came to light that in the largest cities there 
had been Protestants worshiping in private houses for nearly a 
century. They had kept the fire alive on the altar. They now 
had their pastors and churches prudently in open day, for nobody 
dared to execute the old edicts. They owed less to the phil- 



592 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

osophers of the time — the infidel school of Helvetius, Diderot, 
Voltaire — than is often supposed.* These men hated persecu- 
tors, but detested the religion of the persecuted ; they helped to 
make toleration the watchword of the century, but advocated 
a freedom from all religion. They ushered in the intolerance 
and destructiveness of infidelity. Few of them made any plea 
for the Protestants, who owed vastly more to the legists, states- 
men, members of Parliament, and magistrates. After long 
years of discussion and the growth of humane principles, the 
Edict of Toleration came in 1787, granting to "non-Catholics" 
the right to live in France, to exercise a trade or profession, to 
legalize their marriages, to register the births of their children, 
and to be buried in peace. Under this the Protestants 
could take still larger liberties. Their houses resounded with 
thanksgivings to God. The long century of their woes had 
virtually passed. 

Then came the Revolution. In the first stage of it (1789- 
1792) great tyrannies were overthrown, and some just measures 
were instituted. Its chief good was then accomplished. France 
had its Constituent Assembly, and in it sat Rabaut St. Etienne, 
a member from Nismes, and a son of the old pastor who had 
trodden nearly every mountain-path of Languedoc while restor- 
ing the Church of his fathers. This son had entered the min- 
istry, and earnestly pleaded for Calas and other brethren in the 
Parliament of Toulouse. Now he courageously says, "I assert 
the civil rights of Frenchmen for two millions of useful citi- 
zens. Toleration ? Nay, liberty is what we ask. Equality 
of rights is our demand. Europe pants for freedom." He 
gained his point substantially. He was elected to the chair of 
that house, and there was a sublimity in his message to his 
aged father, ' ' The President of the National Assembly kneels 



*Two facts are of value. I. Before Voltaire was born toleration on a 
Protestant basis was attained in a high degree in Holland and in England by 
the act of William III, 1689. This was the greatest permanent advance in 
religious liberty yet made in Europe. 2. Voltaire and his school did not re- 
ceive their infidelity from Protestantism. They were reared in the papal 
Church, and Voltaire never actually left it. But their ideas of toleration may 
be traced to Henry IV, whose motives were political. It is not denied, how- 
ever, that free thought has contributed its part to toleration ; still it does not 
deserve all the credit. Roger Williams (1634) in America was far in advance 
of all these men, and was not a skeptic nor oppressed. 



THE REVOLUTION. 593 

at your feet!" But the Revolution became a furious tempest, 
which made wreck of the throne, government, new constitu- 
tion, the Gironde, law, order, society, justice, religion, civili- 
zation. The Reign of Terror began. Infidelity, atheism, and 
vice were rampant. All public worship was put down. The 
folly, or blasphemy, of impersonating an idea as the Goddess 
of Reason marked the extreme of atheism. The wholesale 
murder of priests was the proof of intolerance and inhumanity. 
The infernal world seemed to have broken loose in Paris. The 
very nationality was slaughtered. Louis XVI was put to death 
in 1793. Truer patriots were executed. Young Rabaut was 
sent to the scaffold. His venerable father suffered in prison, 
but died in his liberty, in 1795, thankful to God that some of 
the reformed Churches were re-establishing themselves. 

But the avenger of France came in the brilliant soldier of 
Corsica. Out of the ruins of the state Napoleon built up a 
new government.* Romanism was the established religion; 
but Protestantism had his protection, and the theological school 
of Montauban was reorganized. He secured a law which 
allowed its pastors a salary from the public treasury. Another 
son of Paul Rabaut presided in the Legislative Assembly, and 
wrote to his brethren (1807): "No longer in deserts and at 
the peril of your lives do you worship God. Our places of 
worship are restored to us ; every day new ones arise. Our 
pastors are recognized and salaried by the government." But 
the presbyterial system was not fully restored. De Felice says : 
"From 18 1 7 to 1830 we have to complain of no important act 
of intolerance. We might relate favors sometimes, and security 
always, for the mass of the Protestant population." 

The French Church needed spiritual earnestness. In the 

* Napoleon Bonaparte, born 1769, in Corsica; rose in the French army to 
the command of the National Guards; by his defense of the republican Conven- 
tion he became chief commander of the army, 1796; conquered Italy and Egypt 
and was elected First Consul, 1799 ; restored public worship by concordats and 
allowed exiles to return to France; chosen Emperor of the French, 1804; 
England and all nations east of the Rhine against him, 1805-14; the allies took 
Paris — he abdicated, and was ten months at Elba; Louis XVIII set up; Napo- 
leon returned, and was a^ain emperor until defeated at Waterloo by Wellington 
and the allies, 1815 ; abdicated, and was confined on St. Helena till death, 
181 5-21. His religious toleration won him the hearts of millions. He was fond 
of talking sublimely on theology. Ambition, will, faithlessness in treaties, and 
his assumed dictatorship over Europe, ruined him. 

38 



594 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

revival much was due to Frederic Monod, who kindled the 
true light in his little Sunday-school at Paris. ' ' Never will the 
traces of his labors be effaced, " says De Pressense; "for we 
owe to him the first furrows in the vast field which we now 
rejoice to see white unto the harvest." Another leader in the 
revival was Dr. Charles Cook, the Wesley of France (1817-58), 
who went from town to town scattering the good seed of the 
kingdom of Christ. He left behind him a French Methodist 
Church of fifteen hundred members, with a hundred and fifty 
chapels, well supplied with ministers, and now ably organized 
for aggressive work. Societies for printing and circulating the 
Bible and religious literature were formed. Schools were estab- 
lished. The Lutherans had gained a footing. In 1838 they 
had about two hundred and fifty ministers, and the Calvinists 
nearly twice that number. Louis Napoleon (1848-70)* was 
nominally tolerant, but the old Protestant Church was not able 
fully to restore its Confession and polity. A minority separated 
from it and formed the Evangelical Union, or Free Church, to 
which belong Fish and De Pressense. M. Thiers, President of 
the French Republic, allowed the main body, in 1872, to restore 
the National Synod. This was largely due to the efforts of the 
historian and statesman, Guizot, who sat in it among the one 
hundred and eight delegates, and nobly advocated the faith of 
his fathers, one of the last great acts of his noble life. The 
old Confession of Faith was reaffirmed, although this grand 
declaration was opposed by Coquerel and Colani, the leaders 
of the rationalistic party. This minority will probably secede, 
and form a body like that of the Unitarians in England. The 
synod now stands as the restored Church of the French Refor- 
mation. Other branches of Protestants have fair prospects in 
France. The republican tendencies are growing stronger against 

* Nephew of the great Napoleon, born 1S08 ; in exile, 1815-37; failed to 
wrest the throne from Louis Philippe ; in the revolution of 1 848 was re-elected to 
the National Assembly, and President of France for four years, 1848-52 ; 
overthrew the republic at Rome and restored Pope Pius IX, 1849-60; by a 
coup cfttat, 1851, and by the army, became emperor; allied with England in 
the Crimean war against Russia, 1854-56 : defeated Austria in the Italian war, 
1859; war against the liberals in Mexico, 1861 ; provoked Count Bismarck and 
the Germans against him, 1866-69 ; declared war against Prussia, July, 1870, 
but surrendered to the Prussians at Sedan in September; soon died; and France 
became once more a republic, 1870-79, with a growing opposition to the Ro- 
manist clergy and toleration to Protestants. 



THE SWISS RESTORATION. 595 

the Romish priesthood. The new efforts to organize societies 
to advance Protestantism find increasing favor among the peo- 
ple. Since 1820 this Church has had its foreign missions, 
especially in South Africa. 

III. The Swiss and the Waldenses. 

Professor J. A. Turretine, eager for the union of all evan- 
gelical Christians, started a liberal movement at Geneva. He 
died in 1737, and the pietism which he advocated declined. 
Subscription to the old Confession passed into neglect. About 
1780 Arianism and Socinianism got almost entire possession of 
the famous stronghold. The city had its infidel clubs ; the 
canton was swept by German rationalism. The morality of 
Socrates was preached, rather than the divinity and atonement 
of Jesus Christ. Diodati and a few other ministers endeavored 
to resist the storm of rationalism and revolution. Rousseau 
and Voltaire had a powerful influence — the one as a citizen, the 
other as a neighbor. From 18 10 to 18 16 there was not one 
evangelical professor or preacher in the established Church of 
Geneva. A remnant of the faithful still met and prayed with 
the Moravians, who had services there. Madame Krudener, in 
her travels, planted Gospel truths in other hearts. Robert 
Haldane, of Scotland, spent several months there, inviting to 
his rooms students, pastors, and professors, and led young men 
to the faith of Calvin. The established Church was opposed 
to these doctrines. Malan, Bost, Gaussen, D'Aubigne, Vinet, 
and Monod led the way in the revival. They formed the 
Evangelical Society, or Free Church, with its theological school 
and parishes. In 1835 the third centennial jubilee of the 
Reformation was celebrated with enthusiasm ; but there was 
still a great gulf between the Free Church and the Venerable 
Company, for the latter took measures against the preaching 
of the very doctrines on which the first reformers had built 
their system. But the Evangelicals have done very much to 
restore the reformed faith and polity. 

In all Switzerland there are two classes of Protestant 
Churches: 1. The national bodies, of which there are about 
twenty, each in its canton. 2. The Free Churches of Geneva, 
Vaud, and Neuchatel, which come nearest to holding the Con- 
fessions of the sixteenth century. In all the cantons there are 



596 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

about sixteen hundred thousand Protestants, eleven hundred 
and fifty ministers, and six theological faculties. There is no 
general synod, no union of the several Churches. 

The Waldenses, claiming to have been free from Romanism 
before the Reformation, were spiritually enriched by the re- 
formed Churches. Olivetan translated for them the Bible. 
Their presbyterial system was revised. Their creed was Au- 
gustinian, as shown in their protest of 1603 and their Confes- 
sion of 1689. But they were severely persecuted, and villages 
of them were burnt and butchered. France and Italy were 
their enemies, Savoy their murderer. The mountains were 
their refuge, the Lord their fortress. They were driven up into 
the narrowest valleys, where one would suppose the chamois 
would starve. The period from 1630 to 1690 is one of the 
most thrilling and heroic in all their wonderful history. At 
times their sufferings were extreme and awful. Towns were 
destroyed, bands of fugitives perished in the snows, and exiles 
wandered into Protestant countries. Their numbers had been 
reported as about eighty thousand, but in 1650 not more than 
twenty thousand remained alive in their native valleys. Oliver 
Cromwell nobly and quite imperiously interfered in their behalf. 
He rose above diplomatic etiquette in his letters to the Duke 
of Savoy and Louis XIV of France. He demanded justice in 
his letters, penned by Mary Milton, whose blind father con- 
densed history and prophecy in the eloquent sonnet: 

"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold ; 

Even them, who kept thy truth so pure of old, 
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones, 
Forget not. In thy book record their groans, 

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold 

Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled 
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans 
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they 

To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow 
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway 

The triple tyrant ; that from these may grow 
An hundred-fold, who, having learnt thy way, 

Early may fly the Babylonian woe!" 

Liberal sums of money were paid to the Waldenses by 
England, and annuities were promised. But when Cromwell 



THE GLORIOUS RETURN. 



597 



was gone Charles II wasted these sacred funds on his minions, 
and for a long time there -was no arm to restrain Louis XIV in 
his cruelties. The poor Vaudois were to be utterly extermi- 
nated, if possible. If they had not been the hardest of people 
to kill they must have been wiped out of existence. Treaties 
were made with them on the principle that no faith is to be 
kept with heretics. They were mere decoys. Then came the 
dragonnades. When thousands had been slain, imprisoned, 
and banished, a French officer wrote in 1686 to his king, "All 
the valleys are wasted ; all the inhabitants killed, hanged, or 
massacred." But there was a remnant left. Among the exiles 
were Pastor Leger, the historian of his people, and Gianavel, 
the brilliant general. These men and their spirited brethren 
began to organize the exiles at Geneva. Among them was a 
patriarchal minister, aged ninety-six, leading seventy-two of his 
children and grandchildren. The Genevese were enthusiastic 
in their hospitality ; and no traitor exposed the grand secret 
which young Henri Arnaud was telling his people. This daring 
pastor vowed not to let his sword rust until the Roman cross 
was torn down from the thirteen remaining churches of his fa- 
thers. He and eight hundred sure-footed men hasted over the 
glaciers, swooped down like eagles into their valleys, slew 
French troops, took Bobbio by storm, entered the church, and 
filled it with an outburst of praise to the God who remembered 
Zion. This was the glorious return. 

The Duke of Savoy joined the Grand Alliance of William 
III of England, granted to the Waldenses their homes and 
liberties, and assisted exiles in their return. But four years 
later (1696), when they were fairly settled, and happy in their 
narrow valleys, he renewed his league with Louis XIV, and 
bitterly persecuted them ; for the pope insisted upon the slaugh- 
ter of the heretics. King William did not fail to renew the 
English aid and protection to this poor people. They greatly 
suffered through another century. Napoleon came, and by his 
triumphs forced new ideas upon kings. He had defended this 
remnant ofjGod's saints for eight years when he was at Milan, 
1805, to receive the iron crown of North Italy. He there 
granted to the Waldensian Church new privileges. Its pastors 
were paid by the French Empire until it fell. In the restora- 
tion of this ancient Church an active part was taken by Felix 



$g8 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Neff, a young soldier, then student at Geneva, and pastor in 
the Dauphinese Alps (1823). He taught the people how to 
improve their lands, homes, roads, and schools. He civilized 
them while reviving their piety. He went into Piedmont, or- 
ganized prayer-meetings, kindled religious zeal, and co-operated 
with such pastors as Muston and Revel, and with such English 
helpers as Dr. Gilly, and Major Beckwith, who devoted the rest 
of his life to the social, moral, civil, and religious welfare of 
the people. Liberal funds were sent to them from Britain, 
Russia, America, and nearly all Protestant lands. Ever since 
1848 their liberties have increased and their schools prospered. 
Their college and theological seminary, once at La Tour, is 
now at Florence. They greatly aided Victor Emmanuel 
(1849-78) in fulfilling Milton's prophetic prayer, so that the 
pope is no longer "the triple tyrant" of Italy, and their faith 
is sown over all the Italian fields. The larger cities are centers 
of evangelization. Their forty well -organized Churches and 
their working forces are closely rivaled by the Free Italian 
Church, founded about i860 by De Sanctis and Gavazzi, on a 
Presbyterian basis. Never, since the reign of Theodoric the 
Goth, has there been so much toleration at Rome.* 

IV. German Protestantism. 

Learning continued in Germany during the Thirty Years' 
War, but it was scholastic and controversial. Theology lacked 
warmth and charity. ' ' The language of faith was more valued 
than the life of faith. Purity of creed was more highly prized 
than holiness of heart. The form of sound words swathed a 
lifeless skeleton." For this dead orthodoxy there were reme- 
dies proposed. 

(1.) Union or Syncretism was urged by George Calixtus, a 
Lutheran professor at Helmstadt (1614-56), ranking next to 
John Gerhard in theology, and a second Melancthon in his 
conciliatory spirit. He labored for years to unite the Lutherans 
and Calvinists, and even Roman Catholics, on the basis of the 
Holy Scriptures, and the decision of the councils held during 
the first five Christian centuries. This brought him into a fierce 
controversy with no very beneficial results. f Dr. Dorner says: 

*Note IV. 

t Rev. John Durie (Durseus), a Scot, had a passion for the union of the 



pietism. 599 

"The Calixtine tendency was rather a school of learned the- 
ologians, to whom the cause of culture and literature was dearer 
than that of religion and morality." Its historical spirit culmi- 
nated in Mosheim; its critical and liberal in rationalism. 

(2.) Pietism came forward in the reaction against the cold 
and critical spirit. It rose in the Lutheran Church with Spener, 
whose heart was set on the revival of true godliness. He was 
the German Wesley. About 1670 he began at Frankfort his 
private meetings for prayer and conference — his Collegia Pietatis. 
In his book entitled, "Pious Desires," he set forth his views 
of the evils existing in the Church and their remedies. At first 
the orthodox Lutherans generally had his sympathies, but cer- 
tain men ran into extravagant fervors and prejudiced the cause. 
The wiser leaders formed classes for the study of the Bible, 
and soon had crowded meetings, with many converts. They 
promoted a spiritual revival. They insisted that no man was 
qualified to teach Christianity unless he were a model of piety. 
This they exalted above learning and intellect or subscription 
to creeds. Spener was ecclesiastically punished as a preacher 
of dangerous and erroneous tenets. But his disciples filled 
chairs of theology in the new University of Halle. One of 
them was Francke, whose philanthropy led him to found the 
Orphan Asylum and educational institutions for the poor, at 
Halle, and secure their endowment. He made Pietism popular 
and a source of immense benefit, especially when Halle and 
Wurtemberg were radiating centers of its light.* The good 
effects were not so likely to be reported as the fanaticism which 
was resisted by mobs. Certain states forbade the Pietistic con- 
venticles. In Silesia mere children held their meetings in the 
fields. The Pietists repelled the idea that they were a new sect. 
They affirmed that they wished to preserve the Lutheran ortho- 
doxy and teach a Biblical, practical, vital Christianity which 



Lutherans and Calvinists, and for it spent years of travel on the Continent 
(1631-74). The Calvinists were the more favorable to it. 

* These movements were favored by Frederick, the first king of modern 
Prussia, self-crowned 1701, died 1713 ; gave welcome to Protestant refugees 
from France. Frederick William I, 1713-40, expelled the philosopher, Wolf, 
from Halle, 1727, when he was trying to popularize the doctrines of Leibnitz 
along with some rationalistic ideas of his own. The philosopher had many the- 
ologians on his side. The gates of Germany were opening to so-called free- 
thought. See Note I. 



600 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

was to be adorned with good works, benevolence, self-denial, 
and the spirit of missions. Their system declined in the next 
century. Most of its followers became either sentimental or 
censorious, legalistic or liberal, and some of them rationalistic. 
J. A. Bengel (1687-1752), whose commentaries are still highly 
esteemed, wisely founded a school of Biblical criticism, exegesis, 
and theology. At first he drew little sympathy to his views 
and his work. But a circle of really pious souls gathered round 
him in private at Tubingen and elsewhere, who became the 
disseminators of his teachings. In him the noblest pietism 
attained its height. 

Closely allied to the Pietists were the Moravians. A rem- 
nant of the Hussites had been preserved in the United Brethren. 
During the Thirty Years' War they were sorely persecuted, 
many of their nobles executed, and hundreds of families driven 
from Moravia and Bohemia into various lands, where they 
adopted the several types of Protestantism, or some kind of 
reformed religion. Early in the eighteenth century a band of 
them, led by Christian David (a convert from Romanism), 
found refuge on the estates of Count Zinzendorf in Lusatia, 
and built Herrnhut. The count, who had been trained in the 
schools of the German pietists, became their bishop. They 
formed vast plans of missionary enterprise. Some went to 
Lapland and Greenland, others to Africa, Tartary, Ceylon, and 
wherever there was an opening, and a man to go on the face 
of the earth. The life of Zinzendorf (1700-60) is romantic. 
He traveled widely, sought to introduce his people in nearly 
all Protestant lands, imparted a grandeur to his schemes and 
efforts, but was not free from sentimental extravagances. He 
led a colony to the banks of the Delaware in the United States. 
He exalted love above faith, and hardly understood his own 
mystical theology. But the Moravians were rescued from his 
extreme notions, and they justly regard him as the chief of 
their modern fathers, to whom they owe a lasting debt of 
gratitude. They owe to Spangenberg, who was in America 
(1735-62), their renovated theology, which is mainly Lutheran. 
They have vied with the Jesuits in missionary zeal. 

The term rationalism has been given to the most peculiar, 
comprehensive, and powerful of all intellectual movements that 
ever exalted human reason above the revelation of God in his 



RATIONALISM. 601 

works and Word, and made it the decisive test of fact and 
truth. It long ignored the historical foundations of Chris- 
tianity. In its modern form it did not originate entirely in 
Germany, but it concentrated there most strongly, and thence 
spread through the civilized world. In its broadest scope it 
includes the histories of the following subjects: (i) Philosophy 
from Des Cartes, 1637, t0 Schleiermacher, 1834, with a basis 
in the doctrine of religious consciousness; from Spinoza, 1670, 
to J. H. Fichte and Hegel, 183 1, in theories of pantheism; 
from the Optimism of Leibnitz, 1700, to the Pessimism of 
Schopenhauer, 1844, one regarding this as the best possible 
world, and the other the worst; and from Kant, 1770, to Jacobi 
and Herbart, 1833-41, on the basis of a divine moral govern- 
ment, the immortality of the soul and future retribution. (2) 
Infidelity, from the Deism or " Natural Religion," which came 
in the stream of English writings by Hobbes, Herbert, Shaftes- 
bury, Bolingbroke, and Hume, 1755, to the French literature 
of the Encyclopaedists, Rousseau, and Voltaire, thus contribut- 
ing to the German Deism which rose in the age of Frederick 
the Great, with his toleration and patronage of liberal thought. * 
(3) Illuminism and literature, through the times of Klopstock, 
the German Milton, 1747, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, 
Richter, and Auerbach. (4) Physical science, from La Place, 
with the nebular hypothesis, 1796, to Oken with his theory of 
development, 1840-51, Comte and Positivism, the hypothesis of 
evolution and atheistic materialism. (5) Biblical criticism, from 
Semler, 175 1, "the father of German Rationalism," to David 
Strauss, F. C. Baur, and the Tubingen School; and to the 
defenders of the Bible from Bengel to Hengstenberg, 1869, who 
have helped to produce the greatest apologetic literature since 
the fifth century. (6) Theology in its degeneracy, from the 
Wolfian divines, 1730, to Wegscheider, 1848, and in its restor- 



* Frederick II, 1740-86, recalled Wolf to Halle, brought Voltaire into his 
new academy at Berlin, cultivated French manners and French thought. "The 
Illumination " was a marvelous outburst of the German intellect in literature 
and science; religiously it was the light of a raging fire which left all things in 
dross and fusion. Frederick William II, 1786-97, decreed severe punishment 
on the clergy who did not preach the old doctrines, but the edict failed. Prus- 
sia was now the great German state; to it was added, after Kosciusko fell, about 
one-fourth of Poland ; the rest of Poland went to Russia. It has been said that 
the three German idols are Luther, Frederick the Great, and Goethe. 



602 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ation by Tholuck, 1824, Julius Miiller and their co-laborers. 
This rationalism pervaded the classical and theological schools, 
the pulpits and consistories. It cast out the devout hymns and 
liturgies, and the people in the churches heard and sang the 
baldest sentimentalism. 

One peculiarity of German rationalism was that it centered 
upon the Bible. In England that book was flung aside by the 
Deists ; in France it was a theme of coarse jesting ; in Germany 
it was a subject of critical study. It was not believed by ardent 
scholars who devoted their lives to correcting its text, hailing 
with delight a new reading or ingenious sense, framing laws of 
interpretation, devising theories of its origin, sifting its eviden- 
ces and history, making grammars and lexicons of its languages, 
thrusting one book after another out of the sacred canon, but 
still expounding them in some way and forming systems of 
theology and ethics on its teachings. When they proclaimed 
that it was destroyed, they were still fascinated by it. In this 
fact was the final remedy for the departure of reason from 
faith. For still the question rose: ''What shall I do with the 
Christ?" A literature upon the Life of Christ was produced, 
surprising in extent, and, after Neander's time, a large part of 
it growing more and more consistent with the Gospel records. 

Neander, the founder of modern Church history, thought 
that the return to evangelical truth began about 1800 largely 
by the influence of his teacher and colleague at Berlin, Fred- 
erick Schleiermacher (1768-1834). This "Plato of Germany," 
a child of the reformed Church, reared in the Moravian piety 
and always aglow with it ; often charged with pantheism and a 
Sabellianism quite like that of Swedenborg ;* seeking to gather 
the truths of all philosophies into his own, and find in Chris- 
tianity the unity of all facts; as ready as Von Miiller to say that 
Jesus Christ is the center of all history and the key to all its 
problems; not merely a speculative thinker, but also a devout 
worshiper, earnest preacher, and lover of souls, did immense 
service by basing religion in the consciousness of man and his 
dependence on God. Intuition, the deep theology of the heart, 
the facts of experience, faith, hope, charity, were all greater 
than reason. With these ideas he shattered Rationalism and 
left a host of followers to spike its guns. At his death, 1834, 

* Note II. 



RENOVATION OF THE CHURCH. 603 

it was said: ''He gave up every thing that he might save 
Christ," save the ideal, the person, the power of Christ from 
the destructive forces of criticism and philosophy. Chris- 
tianity must have been in great peril when a man of his 
inconsistent theories could render it such a service as enti- 
tled him to be called "the renewer and prince of theolog- 
ical science." 

But there were thousands who had not bowed the knee to 
Baal. Chief among the faithful sons of the Church were La- 
vater, Stilling, Claudius with his Wandsbeck Messenger, and 
Father Oberlin, for sixty years (1 786-1 826) .the saintly pastor 
in the Steinthal, where civilization was promoted and piety 
retained. The German people, who grew weary of sermons 
on criticism, science, trade, and farming, fed their souls on the 
Bible, the old hymns, and the writings of the Fathers and 
reformers. Many took refuge in the Moravian chapels or with 
the more pious and generous Roman Catholics. The baroness, 
Madame Krudener, 1814-24, traveled through Europe, preach- 
ing, with a dash of fanaticism, many simple doctrines of the 
Gospel. One good man did a vast work: John Urlsperger, of 
Augsburg, who traveled through Germany, Holland, and Eng- 
land, in the effort to unite all true Christians in practical work. 
His German Society of Christianity (1780) had several branches. 
one of which became the Basle Bible Society (1804), an d others 
were efficient in behalf of missions, charity-schools, asylums 
for the deaf, dumb, and blind, hospitals, circulating libraries, 
and itinerant preaching. Pestalozzi saw how the children of 
his native Switzerland were impoverished by the French wars. 
He began to teach them. His system extended (1 775-1 827) 
until it became national, and was imitated in Germany. It had 
its root in the family. If not directly Christian, it was far from 
skeptical, and it nurtured patriotism with lofty morality. 

The renovation of the Church and of theology came also 
on other lines. Prussia was not only the great representa- 
tive, but was the restorer and reorganizer of Germany. "In 
Prussia the regeneration of Germany was prepared." We must 
notice the chief movements. 

1. By his conquests the first Napoleon became virtually 
master of the German States (1806-13). They were dismem- 
bered. The old German Empire was ruined ; Francis II, of 



604 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Austria, the last successor of Charlemagne, abdicated his throne 
(1806). The old feudalism was destroyed. Prussia lost half 
her territory, and yet she was destined to create a new empire. 
The king, Frederick William III, 1 797-1 840, with the aid 
of the vigorous Baron Stein, anxious to see a free people in 
Prussia, roused his subjects to the war of liberation (18 13-15), 
joined the allies, crossed the Rhine, triumphed at Paris, and 
won back his provinces, to the great joy of ten millions of 
people. In these wars the Germans thought of Luther's bat- 
tles against the pope, and his love for the father-land ; and they 
asked if his faith was not a cause of his patriotism. Happy 
for them if they could have it once more ! 

2. The Holy Alliance, 181 5, was formed by Frederick 
William, with the emperors Alexander of Russia and Francis 
of Austria, who represented the Protestant, Greek, and Roman 
Catholic Churches, on the basis of Christianity, without dis- 
tinctions of creed, as the supreme law for the life of nations. 
It was intended to secularize war and politics, and induce the 
nations to live as brothers of one vast Christian family. 
Into it came all the rulers of Europe, except the pope, the 
sultan, and the prince regent of England. Grand as were its 
declared intentions, it was perverted into a dictatorial and con- 
gressional system of politics for maintaining the balance of 
power in Europe. 

3. The Jubilee and the Union. In 18 17, October 31st, the 
third centennial of the Reformation, or Luther's theses, was 
celebrated with enthusiasm and reviving effects. The popular 
mind was turned from the negative to the positive side of Prot- 
estantism. Professor Harms, of Kiel, read his ninety-five theses 
and recalled the doctrines of Luther. But he took strong 
ground against the favorite scheme of King Frederick William 
and Schleiermacher. That was a union of the Lutherans and 
Calvinists in one national Church, with both the Augsburg 
Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, and a new lit- 
urgy. The king prepared for it by his proclamation of Sep- 
tember 27, 18 17 — the Magna Charta of the Prussian Estab- 
lishment — in which he proposed to join with members of the 
two bodies at Potsdam in a united observance of the Lord's 
Supper, on the festival day. This plan he recommended to 
the churches elsewhere, and to the consistories. He carried it 



THE CHURCH IN PRUSSIA. 605 

through in his own city, and Bunsen regarded his act as the 
great event of the century. In Prussia about seven thousand 
seven hundred and fifty congregations adopted the union ; 
about twelve hundred refused it. Thus was formed the 
present Established Church of Prussia. The union was grad- 
ually effected in other states, generally on a similar basis. 
But throughout Germany, those who retained "the Lutheran 
consciousness," under such leaders as Harms and Hengstenberg, 
became either Old or New Lutheran bodies, independent, and 
generally more pronounced in evangelical doctrine. Nor did 
all the Calvinists enter the union, so that there were long 
debates between three parties, the Unionists, the Lutherans, 
and the Reformed. In Prussia, the Old Lutherans were 
roughly handled, some of the leaders being fined and impris- 
oned, until the reign of Frederick William IV, 1840-61, who 
strongly opposed all compulsion in the sphere of religion. 
Some of them came to the United States, and now form the 
Synods of Buffalo and Missouri. The Church Diet, repre- 
sented by adherents of both Confessions, is the highest tribunal 
of the Prussian Church. 

4. Prussia is virtually the political name for Germany, for 
by the new organization of the empire and its constitution of 
1871, her king, William I (1861), is the German emperor. 
The population of the empire is nearly forty-three millions, 
of whom more than one-third are Roman and Old Catholics. 
Nearly all the rest are Protestants. Besides those just named 
there are several bodies of Dissenters, Moravians, Mennonites, 
Socinians, Light Friends (rationalistic), and German Catholics, 
or followers of the ex-priest John Ronge (1844). The Amer- 
ican Baptists and Methodists have prosperous missions in Ger- 
many. The renovation of the German Churches brought with 
it a fresh vigor in the ten universities, better popular education, 
and many active societies for the circulation of the Bible, for 
Home and Foreign Missions, Sunday-schools, benevolence, and 
Christian literature. German works of theology, exegesis, his- 
tory, and aesthetics, together with cyclopaedias, have gone into 
all Christendom. Rationalism still passes through new phases 
in Germany, where each successive philosophy has had a run of 
about ten years, but it is not unified by a creed or a worship. 
It once tended to pantheism ; now to materialism. The new and 



606 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

rationalistic German Protestant Association, led by Dr. Schenkel 
of Heidelberg, is persistent in an effort to divorce Church and 
state in the German Empire. (See frotes III, IV, V, VI.) 



NOTES. 

I. Frederick William I, of Prussia, gave a home to nearly twenty 
thousand exiles from the region of Salzburg, where they had been sorely 
persecuted by the Romanists, and whence they were expelled, in 1732, on 
account of the religion which the Bible had taught them. He would gladly 
have taken all of the poor Salzburgers, but England provided funds and sent 
a colony of them to Georgia, in the United States. With them came some of 
the first Lutheran preachers in America, one of whom, Bolzius, had been a 
teacher in the Orphan House at Halle. A quite similar persecution was 
waged in Madeira, in 1845, whence many exiles settled in the State of 
Illinois. 

II. Emmanuel Swedenborg, born at Stockholm i68|Tdied in London 
1772; a man of extended travel and learning, who increased the knowledge 
of mechanics and mining operations, and received the title of a baron. 
He describes the turning-point in his religious life thus: "It was in London 
(1743) that on a certain night a man appeared to me in the midst of a 
strong and shining light, and said, ' I am God the Lord, the Creator and 
Redeemer : I have chosen thee to explain to men the interior and spiritual 
sense of the sacred writings.' " Thenceforth he claimed to be in direct cor- 
respondence with the spiritual world, and one result was the record of his 
so-called visions and revelations, his commentaries unfolding the alleged 
natural, spiritual, and celestial senses of Scripture, and expositions of relig- 
ious philosophy. His system is a form of Sabellianism and Gnosticism. 
In 1788 his followers in London formed the "New Jerusalem Church." 
Societies have been quietly established in nearly all Protestant countries. 
They reckon about twenty thousand adherents in the United States. 

III. The Old Catholics. Pius IX took the papal chair in 1846, and 
showed himself to be the greatest pope since Hildebrand and Innocent III. 
Two revolutions unseated him, but still he scarcely realized that he lived in 
the nineteenth century. Devoted to the Virgin Mary, he proclaimed, in 
1854, "the Immaculate Conception." Ten years later he sent his Encyc- 
lical Letter to all Roman Catholic bishops, requiring them to denounce 
and condemn many leading beliefs in science, politics, and Protestantism, 
and uphold his authority as supreme over all human governments. After 
certain commotions and wars, the pope resolved to maintain his lofty as- 
sumptions by having a council to indorse them. The council at Rome, in 
1870, the first since that of Trent, might well be the last, since it declared 
the pope infallible when deciding questions of doctrine, worship, and mor- 
als. This' claim was opposed in the council by a minority, and in France 
by Pere Hyacinthe ( Loyson) and his sympathizers ; but the strongest resis- 



NOTES ON CHAPTER XXII. 607 

tance to it was in Germany. There Dr. J. J. Dollinger was a leader in a 
strong party which admitted the spiritual headship of the bishop of Rome, 
but denied to him any powers that were not recognized by the Church of 
the fifth century. Theirs was the Jansenist doctrine. Hence the term ap- 
plied to them — "Old Catholics." 

An earnest effort was made, in Germany, to induce or compel all bish- 
ops, priests, professors, and teachers in the schools, to accept the doctrine 
of papal infallibility. The success was surprising. The four chief bishops 
complied. But a large number of professors and teachers refused to yield. 
Then the Infallibilists demanded that the government remove the disobe- 
dient. They mustered all their forces in the diet, but lost their case. They 
so mingled in politics as to bring severe measures against them. If they 
should control the Roman Catholic schools and chairs in the universities, the 
pope might come to wield the supreme power in Germany. Even civil obe- 
dience to the national rulers and laws might be ended. The Jesuits and 
other orders had been active, for in Prussia their convents had increased from 
sixty-nine in 1855, to eight hundred and twenty-six in 1869, and in certain 
provinces they controlled the schools. The Protestants and Old Catholics 
demanded the repression of the Infallibilists. The diet of 1872 expelled all 
foreign Jesuits from the empire, as Pope Pius IX had once expelled them from 
the Papal States. Their institutions were suppressed, and Bismarck was de- 
termined that popes shall not rule in Prussia. The next year the Falk-laws 
were passed, requiring all bishops to swear fidelity to the government, and 
applying equally to all parties, but allowing no papal supremacy in Ger- 
many. To these the Old Catholics have no serious objection. They have 
their own churches and schools, on the same footing with Protestants, or 
with the papists who will hold papal infallibility as a merely private dogma. 
The Old Catholics were without a bishop until 1873, when they elected pro- 
fessor Reinkens, who was consecrated by the Jansenist bishop of De venter, 
in Holland, and acknowledged by the Prussian Government as a true " Cath- 
olic bishop." They soon claimed eighty thousand adherents in Germany, 
with seventy priests. In Switzerland they provided for a National Synod, 
which should elect their bishops. Questions of papal supremacy over citi- 
zens in their civil allegiance have risen in England, and W. E. Gladstone 
has written powerfully against it. 

IV. Italy enters on a new era. The imprisonment of such Bible-readers 
as the Madai, and the retention of the Jewish boy Mortara, by the Jesuits, 
caused indignation in Christendom. After the revolution of 1848 the Wal- 
denses and Protestants of various lands began to plant Churches in such 
cities as Milan, Genoa, Turin, and Florence, and still later entered Rome. 
In 1855 all the strictly monastic orders were abolished. Victor Immanuel 
gave constitutional freedom and unity to Italy. The pope lost his temporal 
power (1870), and the Inquisition was repressed. Pope Leo XIII, elected 
in 1878, laments that he can not employ "an efficacious remedy" to grow- 
ing Protestantism. More enlightened men rejoice in his impotency. " I 
daily thank God," said Chevalier Bunsen, on his dying bed, "that I have 
lived to see Italy free. Now twenty-six millions will be able to believe that 
God governs the world." 



608 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

In Spain the Liberals of 1833-44 overthrew the papal hierarchy, turned 
the Inquisition against priests and monks, abolished the monastic orders and 
houses, confiscated their property to the state, and dismissed the papal nun- 
cio. Queen Isabella (1844) began the restoration of Romanism, but a series 
of revolutions prevented a thorough success. Since 1870 the Protestants of 
various countries have made earnest efforts to circulate the Bible and a 
Christian literature, and plant Churches. The prospects were encouraging 
until 1875, when the young Prince Alphonso became king. The fifty thou- 
sand Bibles placed in Spanish homes will not fail to produce good results, 
since the Inquisition is powerless. The theory that Protestantism is a Ger- 
manic spirit and religion, and can not flourish on the soil of the Latin 
nations, may yet be proved false. It struck root in Italy and Spain in the 
sixteenth century, but was torn up by papal violence. It only needs an 
opportunity to be planted again among a people craving for the fruitage of 
constitutional liberty. Not climate, nor race, but Rome, has been its enemy. 
There is now a small Presbyterian denomination, well organized, in Spain. 

V. The Established Church of Russia is Greek, using the popular lan- 
guage. Its visible head is the emperor, who governs it through a synod of 
prelates. Out of nearly eighty-six millions of people, over fifty-four millions 
belong to it. Dissenters are tolerated. About one hundred and twenty 
thousand Raskolniks (apostates) reject the reforms of the learned patriarch 
Nikon, 1652, and have various parties and doctrines. There are about 
seven million four hundred thousand Romanists, two million four hundred 
thousand Mohammedans, two million six hundred thousand Jews, two hun- 
dred and seventy thousand United Greeks and Armenians, two hundred and 
sixty thousand pagans, and two million six hundred thousand Protestants, 
chiefly Lutheran — with a theological school at Dorpat. 

VI. Protestants of various European laftds. The Reformed Church of 
Holland, established in seven states, had no National Synod until 1816. 
By colonies and missions it has branched into other continents. It grew 
rationalistic. Certain deposed but faithful ministers, in 1834, with their flocks, 
organized the free Christian Reformed Church, which has about three hun- 
dred and sixty congregations. They adhere to the old confessions. The 
Established Church of Belgium did not satisfy an evangelical party, which 
formed a free Church (1838). About one-seventh of the fifteen millions of 
people in Hungary are Protestants, and the Calvinists, in 1878, resolved to 
have a National Synod for their two thousand congregations. The Calvin- 
ists of Bohemia are organizing on a more presbyterian basis. 

VII. Sabbath-schools have been established in Germany since 1862, 
largely by the efforts of Mr. Woodruff, of New York, and the American 
Methodists ; in the state Churches there are now about fifteen hundred, and 
in the free Churches over five hundred such schools. 



THE PROGRESS OF LIBERTY. 609 



Chapter XXIII. 

CHURCHES OF THE BRITISH ISLES. 

1688-1878. 

I. The Progress of Liberty. 

Macaulay says, "The highest eulogy which can be pro- 
nounced on the Revolution of 1688 is this, that it was our last 
revolution. Several generations have now passed away since 
any wise and patriotic Englishman has meditated resistance to 
the established government. . . . For the authority of law, 
for the security of property, for the peace of our streets, for the 
happiness of our homes, our gratitude is due, under Him who 
raises and pulls down nations at his pleasure, to the Long Par- 
liament, to the Convention, and to William of Orange. . . . 
Foremost in the list of benefits which our country owes to the 
Revolution we place the Toleration Act." The final effect of 
this act was to grant to all Protestants in England and Scotland 
a larger religious liberty than they had ever enjoyed. While John 
Locke was at this very time pleading for still more freedom, 
his letters on toleration helped to make this measure popular, 
and prepare the way for greater liberality of law. The Friends, 
or Quakers,* who objected to an oath, affirmed their Christian 
belief and their allegiance to the king, and had religious free- 
dom. But the act did not legalize the worship of Romanists 
and Unitarians. The Non-jurors — Sancroft with other bishops 
and four hundred clergy who refused the oath to the king — 
wished to see a Stuart on the throne, kept quiet in their schism, 
lived in pious devotion, held services in hired rooms and private 
houses, grew less in numbers, and their remnant finally merged 
in the Episcopal Church of Scotland. 

When the plan of comprehension failed the Dissenters were 
left to the voluntary system of Church support. By the Test 

*Note I. 

39 



6lO HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Act their ministers must subscribe the doctrinal part of the 
Thirty-nine Articles. Prelacy, Presbytery, and Independency, 
each took its own road into history. The first continued to be 
established by law in England and Ireland, the second in Scot- 
land, and the third was free from the state every-where, except 
for a time, in the Puritan colonies of America. 

To-day a more generous tolerance prevails in the laws and 
spirit of men. Yet all Christians honor most and love best the 
men of that time whose theology was most clean cut, pro- 
nounced, vital to themselves, visible to us, always definite, and 
sometimes defiant of all other beliefs. We care little for the 
writings of Tillotson, the kindly archbishop, whose hand was 
open to all Dissenters, for those sermons, after which the prin- 
ters rushed, give us a dictionary of Greek words and moral 
orations. Among other liberals Cudworth* is left to meta- 
physicians and Burnet to historians. But Pearson, who had his 
battle with the Dissenters, left us an exposition of the apostle's 
creed worth our study ; and George Bull, rich enough to have 
the best private library of his day, touches the heart when he 
defends the Nicene faith. And Bishop Ken is not thought of 
as a non-juror when we sing his doxology, "Praise God, from 
whom all blessings flow." Here is one delightful fact in litera- 
ture. The strife of good writers is forgotten ; we hardly care 
to what Church or party they belonged. We may dissent from 
some of their views, but we claim their books as the common 
heritage of Christianity. Latimer, Jewell, Hall, Fuller, Bar- 
row, and Jeremy Taylor of the Anglicans ; Goodwin, Owen, 
Howe, Brooks, and Doddridge of the Independents ; Ruther- 
ford, Baxter, Ambrose, Matthew Henry, and Poole of the 
Presbyterians; Bunyan and Gill of the Baptists; John Selden 
the Erastian, and William Penn the Quaker ; they are all ours 
in that Christian brotherhood which books render unbroken 
on earth. 

William III was not loved by the nation nor appreciated by 
his age, whose religious liberties he so greatly advanced. 



*Whichcote, Cudworth, and Henry More were leaders of the Cambridge 
Platonists during the seventeenth century. They brought forward moderation, 
religious liberty, the reasonableness of Christianity, and an alliance between 
Christian and philosophic truths. They foreran the present broad churchmen. 
Dr. Tulloch, of Scotland, has ably set forth their principles. 



FROM TOLERATION TO LIBERTY. 6ll 

" More tolerant than his ministers or his parliaments, the child- 
less man seems like the unknown character in algebra, which is 
introduced to form the equation and dismissed when the prob- 
lem is solved." It required more than a century of agitation to 
reach a better solution of the vexed questions between the 
State Church and the Free Churches. His sister-in-law, Queen 
Anne (1701-14), threw the Dissenters into alarm by her eager- 
ness for conformity. They were every-where insulted ; their 
preachers, even in London, were hardly safe upon the streets. 
The common threat of pulling down their meeting-houses was 
executed upon one chapel. But they were strong in numbers 
and social influence. They were loyal, and did not favor the 
pretender, James. While Marlborough was gaining victories 
over the French, and the Psalms of Isaac Watts were finding 
voice in the free Churches, the Tories were threatening to root 
out dissent by the Schism Bill, which required all teachers to 
conform to the Established Church. One bishop argued that 
the bill was needed to prevent the Dissenters from drawing the 
children of the land to their schools, so excellent were the 
teachers. "A poor return," replied Lord Wharton, "for the 
public benefit received from those schools, in which the greatest 
men of the realm have been educated — men who have made a 
glorious peace for England, paid the debts of the nation, and 
advanced commerce." The bill passed; the queen gladly 
signed it ; the blow was about to fall upon the best means 
of education in England, and the seminaries for training dis- 
senting ministers, when "the good Queen Anne" died, and the 
scheme failed. In 1707 Scotland was reunited to England. 
Ireland waited until 1801, for that privilege. 

An epoch in the history of Dissent, and the progress from 
toleration to liberty,* began in the reign of George I (1714-27). 



* Stages of advance in the freedom of Dissenters after the Toleration Act: 
I. Enforcement of the Corporation Act (1661), excluding them from all city offices, 
the Test Act (1673), denying them all civil, naval, and military offices, and the 
Act (1689) requiring subscription to the doctrinal Articles, 1689-1714. 2. Con- 
nivance of subscription, the law being a dead letter; other severe acts usually 
ignored, 1715-79. 3. Release from subscription by Lord Houghton's bill in 
1779, but hearty assent to the Bible and Protestantism required, 1 779-1828. 4. 
Repeal of all disabling acts, 1828-76. A higher degree of liberty had existed 
for forty years in the United States of America, confirmed by the Constitution 
in 1788. 



6l2 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

A Lutheran in profession, too fond of strong beer and lax 
courtesans ; unwilling for the aged Leibnitz to follow him from 
Hanover to England, as the rival of Sir Isaac Newton in phi- 
losophy ; intent on the rights of Calvinists in the Palatinate so 
that the " Heidelberg Catechism goes its free course again;" 
maintaining the Established Churches of England and Scot- 
land, and assured that Christian charity required tolerance of 
all Protestants. He indorsed Bishop Hoadly's sermon (17 17), 
in which an attack was made upon all laws that limited the 
civil rights of any class of Christians. "The Church of Christ 
can not be protected or encouraged by human laws and penal- 
ties." In Parliament Hoadly affirmed that all religious tests 
abridged the natural rights of man, were an injury to the 
state, and a scandal to religion. Other bishops joined him ; a 
strong party grew up in favor of repealing all Test Acts and 
removing all civil disabilities from Dissenters ; but the victory 
was not fully won until England had been shaken by the bold- 
ness of deism, by the roar of immorality, by the reviving spirit 
of Methodism, by the revolutions in America and France, and 
by the evangelical forces which gave rise to the great societies 
for advancing knowledge, missions, benevolence, and reform. 
Then a new age had come. A new order of statesmen had 
risen in the Whig party, which allied itself to the Dissenters. 
In 1828 Lord John Russell advocated the rights of three mill- 
ions of people in the Free Churches, and when he rose in Par- 
liament and gave notice of a motion for the repeal of the Test 
and Corporation Acts, he was loudly cheered. From all quar- 
ters of Great Britain petitions streamed in, and, despite all the 
amendments of Lord Eldon, the repeal bill passed without a 
division. Daniel O'Connell, pleading eloquently for the liber- 
ties of Ireland, had aided in the measure ; the Dissenters 
now joined him in securing the emancipation of the Roman 
Catholics (1829).* Jews and men of every creed have tolera- 
tion in Great Britain. 

II. The Church of England. 

The claim is, that the Anglican theology is based on the 
teachings of the general Church during the first five centuries. 
It was shaped by Pearson, Burnet, and Beveridge in their expo- 

* In 1826 the Irish Presbyterians had urged the measure. 



THE COUNTRY CLERGY. 613 

sitions of the Creed and Thirty-nine Articles; by Bull and 
Waterland in their historical defenses of Nicene doctrine; 
and by Taylor, Stillingfleet, and Butler. After the judicious 
Hooker, minute attention was paid to ecclesiastical polity by 
Bingham and Riddle, and a line of advocates who successfully 
resisted the repeated attempts to modify the liturgy and essen- 
tial canons. Gilbert Burnet (bishop, 1688-17 15), whose his- 
tories show that he knew quite well the Churches of his time, 
wrote that ' ' politics and party spirit eat out what little piety 
remains among us." There was an easiness rather than a true 
liberality in doctrine. Personal religion, in its devouter phases, 
was not advanced. Wise men feared that spirituality would 
become extinct. Morality, defenses of Christianity, and replies 
to deism, were the chief themes of the pulpit. More was done 
to prove, than to apply the truths of the Bible. A fresh zeal 
was kindled for outward rites and services. High-Churchism 
grew into a fashion. One writer says that "the meeting-houses 
of Protestant Dissenters were thought to be more defiled 
places than popish chapels." The country clergy were poor 
and ignorant rather than immoral. Many a curate worked for 
his board in the house of a squire, groomed horses, raised 
turnips, ate at the second table, and did well if he married the 
waiter. Dean Swift, said to be the greatest master of style, 
irony, and humor, that ever had used an English pen, but whose 
piety was in an inverse ratio to his wit, describes the English 
vicar as apt to be rudely treated by the squire, but having a par- 
sonage and a field or two at command. " He has every Sun- 
day the comfort of a full congregation of plain, cleanly 
people. ... If he be the son of a farmer it is very con- 
venient, and his sister may very decently be chambermaid to the 
squire's wife. He goes about on working-days in a grazier's 
coat, and will not scruple to assist his workmen in harvest 
times. He is usually wary and thrifty, and often more able to 
provide for a large family than some of ours (Irish) can do with 
a rectory called three hundred pounds a year. His daughters 
shall go to service, or be sent apprentice to the sempstress in 
the next town, and his sons are put to honest trades." The 
city clergy had their particular clubs and coffee-houses, where 
they met to hear and read the news. Their talk was lively 
when the Revolution was on trial in the case of Dr. Sachev- 



6l4 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

erel, who was arraigned and convicted by Parliament (1710) for 
two sermons in which he censured the government. He was 
suspended from his ministry for three years. 

An improvement began in the clergy when the bishops 
gave more attention to the Word of God. Two societies had 
been formed, one for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge 
(1698), and the other for the Propagation of the Gospel in 
Foreign Parts. By one Bibles, religious books, and tracts were 
distributed at home ; by the other the Gospel was sent to 
heathen lands. There was also, about 1740, a society for the 
reformation of manners, and its reports show a sad state of 
popular morals at that period. ' ' An age that could delight in 
the plays of Congreve, and welcome (especially from a clergy- 
man) such poems as Prior's, has virtually admitted all that has 
been alleged against it. The novels of Fielding and Smollett, 
the letters of Chesterfield, the works of Bolingbroke, are only 
specimens of the diversified evidence that can be brought for- 
ward to the same effect. And though such moralists as Addison 
had not written in vain, and the censorship of society was, in 
1738, on the point of being revived with still greater power by 
Samuel Johnson, the tone of their writings and the facts which 
they adduce is perhaps the most conclusive proof of the point 
to which the general feeling had ebbed." 

It was assumed by certain bishops and clergy that theirs 
was "the Church;" that her continuity and episcopal succession 
were unbroken from the apostles ; that she was Catholic rather 
than Protestant ; that no sacrament was validly administered 
except by men episcopally ordained ; that the sacraments were 
so necessary to salvation as to leave all who died without re- 
ceiving them to the uncovenanted mercies of God ; and that all 
Dissenters entering their Church must be rebaptized. This was 
denying that the Dissenters were Christians. It was exalting 
Churchism at the expense of Christianity, at the very time 
when the Christian faith was powerfully assailed by a new corps 
of Deists. Herbert had attempted to set up natural theology 
in place of Christianity. Now Deism seized upon Locke's 
doctrine of experience as the source of knowledge, and the 
philosopher could not stay its progress by his defenses of Chris- 
tianity. The skeptical thinkers set up a religion of so-called 
common sense. Tindal, a professor of law at Oxford (died 



UNITARIANISM. 615 

1733), tried to show that Christianity was as old as the creation, 
or a merely natural system. The art was to give Deism the 
name of Christianity; but the mere name did not carry Christ 
with it. The most powerful refutation of English Deism was 
made by Bishop Butler in two forms — his " Analogy" (1736), 
and his example of a saintly life. Hume made his assault 
upon miracles, and led the theologians into a new controversy. 
Gibbon was understood to treat the early Church with sarcasm, 
magnify her errors, reduce the number of her martyrs and her 
miracles,* so that he received critical attention. The learned 
clergy were engaged in defending Christianity as a system, 
rather than preaching it as the method and means of salvation. 
From Tillotson to Paley, who died in 1805, there was a noble 
array of talent in the provinces of Christian ethics and evi- 
dences. But good fences do not keep weeds out of a field, nor 
produce rich crops. All the English Churches were invaded 
by another type of free thought, one less extreme, but more 
dangerous ; for it asked a compromise of faith. This was 
Unitarianism, in Arian and Socinian forms. 

John Biddle, the first Unitarian separatist in England, re- 
spected for his learning and devout spirit, died in 1662, after an 
imprisonment for his opinions. His chapel in London was a 
refuge for a band of Socinians who had been expelled from 
Poland, and were scattering widely through Europe. But the 
laws were severe upon them, and the society was disbanded. 
English thinkers, charmed with metaphysical studies, developed 
the modern form of Arianism. Dr. Halley, a Congregational 
historian, says, "The early Unitarians among the non-conform- 
ists were not Presbyterians, as commonly supposed, but Inde- 
pendents and Baptists." But the fact is, all the Churches were 
contemporaneously invaded by it. In 1702 the Presbyterian, 
Thomas Emlyn, was excluded from his pulpit in Dublin for 
Unitarianism. For the same cause Professor William Whiston 
was expelled, in 17 10, from Cambridge. Two years later Dr. 
Samuel Clarke, a rector in London, whose ontological argument 
for the being of God is like that of Anselm, published his 
Arian book on the Trinity. In this new controversy Water- 

*In the warm controversy Dr. Conyers Middleton wrote critically to show 
that miracles ceased with the death of the apostles — an opinion now very 
prevalent. 



6l6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

land was the Athanasius, and the champion of honest subscrip- 
tion to creeds. Avowed and earnest Arianism took refuge 
among the Dissenters for the next seventy years, and made sad 
havoc of the English Presbyterian Church. In 1771 about 
three hundred clergymen of the English Church formed the 
''Feather's Tavern Association," and demanded that subscrip- 
tion to doctrinal articles be abolished, and that the anathemas 
be stricken from the Athanasian Creed. This led to a war of 
pamphlets. Laymen became bolder. The doctrine of the 
Trinity was ridiculed. In the House of Commons one speaker 
said, ' ' I would gladly exchange all the Thirty-nine Articles for 
a fortieth, which should treat of the peace of the Church." 
Bishop Horsely defended the Anglican doctrines. This brought 
out Wakefield, who avowed himself a Socinian. With him 
Christianity was a progressive science. He led a small party 
out of the Church. 

Thus Deism, Arianism, Socinianism, formalism, latitudina- 
rian theology, and public immorality were all working their 
results at the same time. England was alive with controversy 
of all sorts. But during those very years there was one move- 
ment full of redeeming power. Whatever may have been the 
mistakes of some of its leaders, it is now recognized by Angli- 
cans as "a sixth reform." It awoke men to spirituality. 
Howell Harris and Whitefield are not ignored when a Bampton 
lecturer calls it • ' the great Wesleyan revival of personal relig- 
ion — a revival which began within the Church of England; but 
which the leaders of the Church at that time had not the fidel- 
ity or the skill to know how to employ for her advantage; and 
so they thrust it out from them, to swell the ranks and revive 
the dying enthusiasm of dissent." Another Anglican writer 
says, "The Church of Rome, in her deep sagacity, would have 
seized the opportunity, drawn Wesley into closer union, and 
made him the instrument of reviving a languishing cause." 

A goodly number of earnest men, who never left the Church 
of England, went heartily into the movement. Rowland Hill 
was its Latimer, Cecil left us his thoughts, the Venns their 
ideas of Christian duty, the Milners their history, Romaine his 
treatise on faith, and Charles Simeon had great influence at 
Cambridge. John Newton, a sailor in the slave-trade, became 
a saintly rector and writer of hymns. Bishop Porteus, of 



THE REVIVAL. 617 

London, was earnest in the revival. He looked cautiously into 
the scheme of Robert Raikes, a printer at Gloucester, and the 
founder of Sunday-schools, in 1781, and the bishop gave his 
hearty support to an institution which has blessed the children 
of Christendom. He was aided by Hannah More, as White- 
field was by the Countess of Huntingdon. A spirit of philan- 
thropy infinitely more loving to man than that of which the 
French revolutionists boasted, became mighty through William 
Wilberforce, that brilliant, fascinating man, who turned from 
social applauses to the service of Christ and humanity. To 
him, with the Quakers, Clarkson, Gurney, Sharpe, and Buxton, 
with John Howard and Caroline Fry, is largely due the freedom 
of Russian serfs and American slaves, the reformation of hos- 
pitals, and the more merciful treatment of prisoners. Out of 
that spirit has grown a Social Science. That great revival 
carried a Christian heart and hand, Bible and Chapel, to the 
poorest miners, operatives in factories, fishermen, and sailors, 
and began the slow process of their moral elevation. It caused 
bishops and city rectors to preach a more spiritual Gospel to 
the rich. It led to a more faithful pastoral work. If it "evan- 
gelized the Church and saved the nation," it united both of 
them in many a Christian enterprise. Within the English 
Church has sprung up a society for almost every department 
of spiritual work. 

The Low -church party became evangelical. Its adherents 
claimed to stand upon the doctrine and polity of the English 
reformers before the days of Laud. Perry thinks they were 
too Calvinistic r and he says: "In their hands the Church did 
not assert her apostolical claims, her vast privileges as the dis- 
penser of the sacraments, the instrument of covenanted bless- 
ings. With them no appeal was made to primitive order and 
ancient tradition. . . . They had a nervous horror of any 
thing which had been touched by the polluting hands of papists, 
and thus they failed to conciliate the lovers of ancient ritual 
and mediaeval devotion." They were fraternal to all evangel- 
ical bodies of Christians, regarding Christ, and not any visible 
form of the Church, as the true center and source of unity. 
They have loved episcopacy, but apostolic succession has been 
disavowed by many such writers as Ryle, Alford, and J. B. 
Lightfoot. The High -church party has not entirely forgotten 



6l8 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the Calvinism of Whitgift, nor been lost in the Tractarian 
movement, which began in 1833, and for a time agitated the 
entire Church. The Tractarians, or Anglo-catholics, or Pusey- 
ites, with Dr. Pusey as one of their leaders, not only wished to 
secure more liberty for the Romanists in England, but also to 
revive the study of the Fathers and mediaeval writers, and 
to restore certain doctrines and ceremonies which were retained 
in the time of Henry VIII. They sent forth the Oxford 
Tracts, and had much to say in favor of apostolic succession, 
baptismal regeneration, auricular confession, and the real pres- 
ence. Also they wished to show that the Church was a body 
distinct from the state ; that the advantages derived from their 
union were not indispensable ; and that the Church could 
still exist if her revenues were confiscated, as she existed dur- 
ing the first three centuries. But their most vital principle was 
sacramentarianism ; and the movement culminated when John 
H. Newman, in Tract No. 90, endeavored to show how much 
Romanism might be held by a subscriber to the Thirty -nine 
Articles, and when he, more consistently, went into the Roman 
Church. He was followed by many of his friends. One of 
them, Cardinal Manning, now thinks that the Roman Catholic 
Church is "approaching a crisis the most fiery in three hun- 
dred years." The learned Pusey, the devout Keble, and other 
leaders, remained in the English Church. Some of their party 
went to an extreme in ritualism. Orby Shipley, one of the 
many perverts to Rome from the Anglican Church, says that 
he has ' ' long held and long taught nearly every Catholic doc- 
trine not actually denied by the Anglican formularies, and has 
accepted and helped to revive nearly every Catholic practice 
not positively forbidden." That is, he was as disloyal as he 
dared to be in the face of Parliamentary acts (1874) which 
were intended to repress ritualism. 

A third party is that of the "Broad Church," for which a 
road was cleared by S. T. Coleridge, the philosopher, poet, 
and converser; and by Dr. Thomas Arnold, the famous teacher 
at Rugby, the eminent historian, and the comprehensionist who 
urged a scheme for embracing all Dissenters, except a few 
Quakers and Romanists, in the national Church. Episcopacy 
was to be retained, the liturgy used in the morning, and a 
service preferred by Dissenters used at the later hours of the 



DISSENTERS IN ENGLAND. 619 

Sabbath. Molesworth says, ''These proposals, which might 
perhaps have found favor in an ecclesiastical millennium, were 
scouted both by Churchmen and Dissenters, at a time when the 
spirit of religious party raged with a violence and bitterness 
rarely, if ever, equaled." This party shelters a liberal theology. 
In its ranks may be counted Dean Stanley, and the late Pro- 
fessors Maurice and Kingsley, all of strong humanitarian sym- 
pathies. To its new school of history belong Froude and Free- 
man. An extreme rationalism has appeared in Colenso, Bishop 
of Natal in Africa, Baden Powell and his fellow -essayists, the 
Westminster Review, and Charles Voysey, who openly assailed 
the most cherished beliefs of Christendom, and still pleaded, on 
his trial, that he had not contradicted the express words of the 
Articles or the liturgy. He was deprived of his benefice. 

The loyal Anglicans have not yet spoken their last word for 
the truths of Christianity, and for a Church of which Marsden 
says: "No institution since the world began — not the papacy 
in the summit of its pride — ever wielded such an influence as 
the Church of England now possesses. Her members, and 
especially her clergy, scarcely strike a note at home that is not 
listened to throughout the vast American republic, echoed in 
Canadian forests, reported on the Ganges and the Indus, in 
burning Africa and in the countless islands and new-born conti- 
nents of the southern seas."* 

III. Dissenters in England. 

1. The Presbyterians. They sprang into activity as soon as 
the Toleration Act of 1689 was passed. They soon had their 
own* organization, with fully thirty chapels, in London and 
vicinity, some sixty in Yorkshire, and many more in Northum- 
berland; perhaps eight hundred in all England. But in the 
early part of the eighteenth century they were affected by the 
religious declension prevalent in all the Churches. Their sound- 
est men did not see that "it is one thing to preach orthodoxy 
and another to preach the Gospel." Many of them soon failed 
to preach either. Their dead faith was not roused by Arianism ; 
they slept themselves into Unitarianism. This strange lapse is 
often attributed to their neglect of the presbyterial system, their 

* For estimates of the Anglican and other Churches see Notes II and III, 
at the end of the last chapter. 



620 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

affiliation with the Independents, and to their lack of subscrip- 
tion to the Westminster Confession. If this be true, it should 
also be remembered that the Independents were equally op- 
posed to subscription to creeds, and yet they resisted the 
invading Arianism far more successfully. The greater part of 
the English Presbyterians departed from their Calvinistic faith. 
They seemed to be charmed with the metaphysical nature of 
the controversy. They made pleas for the innocency of mental 
error. Their controversy made divisions in 1717, when Mr. 
Pierce, minister at Exeter, was found to omit the doxology in 
his public services. The presbytery proposed that all its mem- 
bers should subscribe the Trinitarian part of the creed. Pierce 
and Hallet refused. They were dismissed from their pastoral 
charges. Pierce ' led three hundred seceders to a new chapel, 
and Unitarianism began to spread with astonishing rapidity. 
The real question now was that of subscription. In 17 19 the 
London Synod had the famous Salter's Hall Controversy; sixty- 
nine voted for subscription, and most of them went over to the 
Independents; seventy-three voted against subscription to any 
human formulary, alleging that it was enough to subscribe to 
the Bible. The Presbyterians generally departed from their 
own Church polity, and most of their congregations, with their 
ecclesiastical property, passed into Unitarianism. 

At least one Presbytery in Northumberland preserved the 
lineage, and reared Robert Morrison, the founder of Protestant 
missions in China (1807). Since then ministers of the Scottish 
Churches began to organize congregations in England. The 
cause lost somewhat by the erratic career of the brilliant Scot, 
Edward Irving, who drew crowds to his Church in London, 
died in 1834, and left his followers to develop Montanistic the- 
ories.* But the loss was more than repaired by Dr. James 
Hamilton and Dr. John Cumming in London. Thus elements 
largely Scottish in form came in existence for a new organiza- 
tion. In 1876 they were united in the Presbyterian Church of 
England; a vigorous body, with about two hundred and sixty 
congregations, ten presbyteries, a college in London with a 
theological faculty, and prosperous missions at home and in 
foreign lands. So the Westminster Confession, without the 
political alliances, is restored to England. 

* Note II. 



THE INDEPENDENTS. 621 

2. The Independents or Congi-egationalists. Their Confession 
of Savoy (1658) was so nearly a republication of the Westmins- 
ter Confession, except in Church polity, that the two were long 
held side by side. Their union with Presbyterians and Baptists 
(1691 and 1730) had a less religious than political value. It 
served to keep in force the Toleration Act and promoted civil 
and religious liberty. One of their most influential men was 
Philip Doddridge, to whom the Dissenters owe their academies. 
He collected young men in his house at Northampton, and 
thus began a theological school which served as a model for 
others. But nearly all the academies were invaded by Socin- 
ianism. Lardner, Priestley, and Belsham drifted into it. Science 
owes much to Joseph Priestley; orthodoxy owes more, for he 
was candid enough to avow boldly his doctrines, after he came 
(as he says), "to embrace what is called the heterodox side of 
every question." He caused men to see where they stood. 
"The unlawful truce with error, which was too long the sin of 
many Dissenters, and which did more mischief than any form 
of warfare, was broken." The Independents braced themselves, 
not only against the Arianizing influences, but also against the 
Antinomianism of Dr. Tobias Crisp and his admirers. He was 
"one of the first patrons of Calvinism run mad." For long 
they adhered to the Calvinism of Westminster. They used 
creeds for purposes of instruction, scientific definition, and pub- 
lic avowal, but not as tests, not as standards to be subscribed, 
nor as bonds of union, " reserving to every one the most perfect 
liberty of conscience." Thus they held until 1833, when the 
Congregational Union of England and Wales was formed. The 
Union put forth a declaration of Calvinistic doctrines. Their 
writers tell us that, on the whole, these doctrines are still held 
by the English Independents, although there are "a few men 
of mental vigor who have departed very considerably from the 
published creeds of Congregationalism." From the time of 
John Owen they have had a line of scholars, apologists, theolo- 
gians, and cyclopsedists of marked ability and world-wide repu- 
tation. They have fully three thousand five hundred churches, 
with several colleges and theological schools of a high order. 
Their literature, their science, and their London missionary 
society (1795) have given them an influence far beyond the 
limits of Britain. There are about five thousand Independents 



622 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

in Ireland. The present Congregational Union of Scotland, 
with about one hundred and twenty churches, is not so much 
due to the followers of John Glas (1725), as to the labors of 
Robert and James Haldane, after the year 1798. They began 
as evangelists, but the opposition to them led to the building 
of chapels and the organization of independent Churches, which 
did not all adopt their practice of immersion. This body has a 
theological college at Glasgow. 

3. The Baptists were differentiated from other Dissenters 
early in the seventeenth century by holding that immersion is 
essential to baptism, and that believers, and not infants, are the 
proper subjects of it. They rebaptized believers who had not 
been immersed. They are independent in Church government. 
Among the General Baptists there was almost every variety of 
doctrine. Most of them became Socinians. In 1770 the more 
evangelical part of them organized the New Connection, which 
now reckons about two hundred churches. The Particular 
Baptists began to organize in 1633, in London. A few years 
later they put forth a Calvinistic Confession of Faith based on 
that of Westminster. Needing toleration, they earnestly pleaded 
for it. Under Cromwell they prospered. In 1660-88 they 
suffered in common with all Dissenters. Of John Bunyan 
(1628-88) Dr. John Owen said to King Charles: ''Had I that 
tinker's abilities for preaching I would gladly relinquish all my 
learning." He was twelve years in Bedford jail, and from it 
he sent out the Pilgrim's Progress, an imperishable allegory 
upon salvation by grace. It placed him in the tolerant re- 
public of literature. He advocated open communion. His 
numerous writings have recently been re-edited by an Anglican 
churchman. 

The Particular Baptists greatly increased in numbers and 
power, after the act of toleration. The learned Jessey and 
Keach were excelled in active Biblical scholarship by Dr. 
John Gill, theologian and commentator, who died in 1771. His 
brethren generally carried their predestinarian views to an 
extreme for a short time, and ceased to entreat all men to 
repent and believe. They addressed the Gospel only to the 
elect and the eternally justified.* The great revival started a 

* The charge of Antinomianism had previously been brought against several 
Congregationalists, the chief of whom was Dr. Tobias Crisp (1642). When his 



THE METHODISTS. 623 

new life in their Churches. Robert Hall and his more distin- 
guished son of the same name, Andrew Fuller, the Stennetts, 
Pearce, Miss Steele, a writer of hymns, John Ryland and John 
Foster were among the shining lights of their age. William 
Carey, a studious shoemaker, was a prince among missionaries 
in Bengal, representing a society founded in 1792, which has 
been active in heathen lands. His terse saying : ' ' Expect great 
things, attempt great things," has become one of the watch- 
words of Christian enterprise. In 1802 the Rev. Thomas 
Charles, of Wales, the chief organizer of the Calvinistic Method- 
ists, met a little girl who was accustomed to walk seven miles 
over the hills to a place where she could read a Welsh Bible. 
He proposed to the Religious Tract Society, at London, that a 
society be formed for supplying the destitute families of Wales 
with the Bible. " Certainly," replied one of the secretaries, 
the Rev. Joseph Hughes, a Baptist, "but if for Wales, why 
not for the world?" To him has been accorded the honor of 
founding the British and Foreign Bible Society, in 1804, its 
officers being chosen equally from churchmen and Dissenters. 
With her two thousand congregations, her missions, colleges, 
literature, and spirituality, the Baptist Church in England and 
Wales has made herself prosperous at home and powerful in 
foreign lands. C. H. Spurgeon, who represents the open com- 
m unionists, and a vigorous but practical Calvinism, has reached 
millions of people with his voice, pen, and widely published 
sermons. No other man has done more to advance theological 
education in his denomination, and to bring it into mutual fel- 
lowship with the rest of the evangelical world. The Scottish 
Baptists, dating from 1765, are less numerous than those of 
Ireland, who are estimated at five thousand members. 

4. The Methodists. Their Church, late in time but large in 
space and power, was born in that blessed revival which made 
an epoch, and whose origin can be traced to no one man, no 
one locality, no special creed, no peculiar sect. Almost con- 
temporaneously the Omnipresent Spirit, who breathed where he 
listed, was giving new life to multitudes of people through the 
labors of Christian David among the Moravians, the Pietists in 



works were republished his views were strongly opposed by Baxter, Howe, and 
forty other ministers of different bodies. The Antinomian controversy was 
intense. 



624 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Germany, Antoine Court in France, Jonathan Edwards in New 
England, certain pastors in Scotland, Howell Harris in Wales, 
and Whitefield and Wesley in England. The widely extended 
work had begun before the Wesleys made any really popular 
impression. 

John Wesley, born in 1703, was the son of a learned rector 
and his saintly wife, at Epworth, in Lincolnshire. He studied 
at Oxford, read a. Kempis and Jeremy Taylor, cherished a de- 
votional religion, and became his father's curate, but soon went 
back to Oxford on a fellowship, and was engaged as a tutor. 
He joined the religious club (1729) of his younger brother 
Charles. Its members adopted certain strict methods of study, 
diet, exercise, and spiritual life ; hence they were called Meth- 
odists. They stood upon no peculiar doctrinal basis. The Wes- 
leys then tended to pietistic ritualism. George Whitefield, the 
son of a godless tavern-keeper, and a servitor at college, poor 
and lonely, in his spiritual struggles almost wished for Luther's 
monastery. These twenty or thirty Oxford Methodists, serious, 
ascetic ; fearful of sinning in a hearty laugh or at a good din- 
ner ; deploring the godlessness prevalent at the university; wary 
of the scholastic tomes in the old library ; reading the Greek 
Testament at fixed hours ; taking the Lord's Supper every Sun- 
day ; keeping only each other's company ; shunned by churchly 
collegians ; ridiculed by deistic students ; nicknamed bigots and 
" Bible moths," but the best of them seeking to do good 
among the poor, took variant paths into the world, and devel- 
oped a variety of views and characters. One fell into rascality; 
another was the village drone of his own parish. Gambold's 
fine hymns do not bewray his vagaries as a Moravian bishop. 
Some of them left the Wesleys with a biting word, and James 
Hervey opposed them in the Christian spirit which glows 
through his Dialogues and Meditations. But the club was the 
cradle of a great society. All the choicer souls, as John Wes- 
ley wrote forty years afterward, " attempted a reformation, not 
of opinions, but of men's tempers and lives ; of vice of every 
kind ; of every thing contrary to justice, mercy, or truth. 
And for this it was that they carried their lives in their hands." 
We have seen that the reform was needed. 

John Wesley was charmed with the ardent piety and the 
fearless faith of the Moravians, whom he met on the rocking 



JOHN WESLEY. 625 

ship when sailing for his brief mission in Georgia,* and others 
whom he visited at Herrnhut. But they were not his wisest 
teachers. The Moravians of London were helpers for a time, 
but they endangered the new movement by their contempt of 
order and religious forms, and they were eliminated from it with 
long and painful effort. Already he cherished his two leading 
ideas : God's love to all men, and the Christian's privilege of 
living in a blissful state of conscious salvation. In the main, 
his theology was that of the Thirty-nine Articles as interpreted 
in the light of the current Arminianism of England, but with 
more warmth, more ardor to save sinners, more earnest pressure 
of evangelical truths upon individuals, and much stress upon 
instant assurance. In his old age he wrote thus of "full sanc- 
tification : This doctrine is the grand depositum which God has 
lodged with the people called Methodists. For the sake of 
propagating this, chiefly, he appeared to have raised them 
up." Also, "to retain the grace of God is much more than 
to gain it : hardly one in three does this. And this should be 
strongly urged on all who have tasted of perfect love." He 
began his career as Spener had begun in Pietism, with the 
plan of forming bands, f or classes, of converts and people seek- 
ing this higher life. The work of gathering, instructing, and 
retaining converts was at the basis of popular organization. 
If the Anglican Church, which he never forsook, had favored 
these classes, prayer-meetings, and the conferences of the 
preachers, and had offered the pulpit to him and his co-labor- 
ers, a different course would have been given to his genius for 
organization, his love of system, his scholarship, his attractive 
accomplishments, his command over men, his good sense, his 
singular union of patience and moderation, his usual gentleness 
towards abusive opponents, his ceaseless industry, and his sanc- 
tified ambition in spiritual work. If he drew lots to obtain the 
answer of God when questions of duty or doctrine perplexed 
him, and had rather extreme ideas about special providences, 
he was decided in his purposes and plans, and he urged them 
forward as one predestined to do nothing else in this hard 



* Whitefield was with him. He labored to found and raise funds for an 
Orphan House in Georgia. 

t Zinzendorf had organized bands in 1727 among the Moravians, and in- 
troduced very simple love-feasts. 

40 



626 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

world. When France needed a restorer of Christian doctrine, 
John Calvin appeared, and when all Paris was against him, he 
gathered a little band about him, opened his Bible and often 
said, "If God be for us, who can be against us." In that con- 
fidence he founded a theology. When England needed Christ 
to vitalize her creed and Establishment, John Wesley appeared ; 
and when in loneliness, weariness, illness, and perils, he could 
hopefully say, "The best of all is, God is with us." In that 
consolation he founded a Church. He was the most toilsome, 
unwearied, organizing spirit in a vast reformation. 

In 1739 Wesley was in London, where the Oxford society 
had struck root. Methodism had its only band in Fetter Lane. 
He had drawn up rules for "band societies," and compiled his 
first hymn-book. He had printed some little volumes, chiefly 
from Calvinistic sources. He preached only a few times. The 
pulpits were nearly all shut against him. He prayed and taught 
in a few private houses. But he was discouraged. He often 
wished for retirement, but he could not endure inactivity, and 
hasted off to Bristol. Whitefield, now returned from Georgia, 
preached about thirty sermons in London churches. The rec- 
tors wanted no more from him. One of them opposed him, but 
the crowd pressed him into the sacred desk, and a disturbance 
threatened a riot. He, too, went to Bristol, but the newspaper 
was there before him, full of warning, and he was plainly told 
by the authorities that he could not preach nor lecture in that 
diocese. This was the turning-point in Methodism. Forbidden 
the pulpit, the preachers took the field, as the Covenanters had 
done, and the Huguenots were still doing. 

Whitefield went to the poor colliers of Kingswood. They 
came by thousands out of the black dust of the mines, and as 
they listened the tears left white traces on their cheeks. Next 
time the woods rang with hymns of praise. Soon he was 
preaching at Cardiff, in the town hall ; then at Bath on the com- 
mons ; next about eight thousand people of Bristol heard him 
on the bowling green. In one place twenty thousand hearers 
were enchanted for one hour and a half. Within six weeks 
he had preached at a dozen places, to immense audiences. The 
whole country was astir. He sent for Wesley, who had doubted 
the wisdom of field-preaching, and felt that he was not yet an 
assured Christian. But he began at Bristol, extended his cir- 



WHITEFIELD— EPWORTH. 627 

cuit, and was soon in London, holding a love-feast with great 
rejoicing in Fetter Lane. Charles Wesley had preached in pul- 
pits as long as he was allowed, and then taken to the open 
field. They soon were glad to know that in Scotland Ralph 
Erskine had turned field-preacher, with fourteen thousand Scots 
to hear him. 

Thus began the bold work. It increased in energy and 
wonder. Whitefield drew about fifty 'thousand people to Ken- 
nington common, and perhaps more to Moorfields. He was 
peculiarly the preacher, John Wesley the organizer, and Charles 
the singer and adviser, often restraining those who evinced their 
feelings in convulsions, and excesses of fear and joy. Whitefield 
traversed England, Scotland, and Ireland, preaching to unnum- 
bered thousands. In thirty-four years eighteen thousand ser- 
mons fell from his lips. He -was seven times in America, 
intent upon supporting his orphan house in Georgia, and pro- 
moting the gracious revival in all the colonies. He died un- 
resting, in 1770, fifty-six years of age, and his remains were 
laid at Newburyport, Massachusetts. He had exemplified his 
apology for labor — "I had rather wear out than rust out." 

When the rector of Epworth curtly denied John Wesley his 
father's pulpit, nearly the whole town came at evening to hear 
him preach from his father's grave. The sublime scene was 
never to be forgotton. The effects, which he describes, were 
not unusual in his audiences and those of Whitefield. He 
says that ' ' Lamentations and great groanings were heard, God 
bowing their hearts so ; and on every side, as with one accord, 
they lifted up their voices and wept aloud ; such a cry was 
heard of sinners as almost drowned my voice. But many of 
these soon lifted up their heads with joy, and broke out into 
thanksgiving, being assured they now had the desire of their 
souls, the forgiveness of their sins. Oh, let none think that 
his labor of love is lost because the fruit does not immediately 
appear ! Near forty years did my father labor here, but he saw 
little fruit of all his labor. I took some pains among this peo- 
ple, too ; and my strength also seemed spent in vain. But now 
the fruit appeared." 

Wesley seemed to travel incessantly on preaching tours 
through the British Isles. His pen was busy with his journal 
and large correspondence. He read the classics and current 



628 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

literature with " history, philosophy, and poetry, for the most 
part on horseback." He tells us that, when delayed by the 
tide in Wales, he sat down in a little cottage and translated 
Aldrich's Logic. He made Notes on the New Testament. He 
wrote or abridged two hundred small volumes, thus forming 
a popular library on a wide range of subjects. He started one 
of the earliest of the many modern Tract Societies. He was 
fifty years in the Calvinistic controversy with some of his co- 
workers. It caused a temporary estrangement between him and 
Whitefield, but their warm friendship was happily renewed. 
If he was almost flayed by the pen of Toplady, we place their 
stirring songs in our hymnals, and hide their quarrel in the 
cleft "Rock of Ages." He did not have such a work of bat- 
tling Romanism and bringing theology into a system, as had 
fallen to Luther, Calvin, and Arminius. His conflicts were dif- 
ferent. Protestant systems had already been settled.. Wesley 
took his choice of them. Yet he was as fiercely opposed in 
his reforms as ever reformers had been in their measures. He 
had plans and methods similar to those of Wyclif. He was not 
arraigned before an "earthquake council," but a volcanic press 
belched its lava upon him. Even the good Rowland Hill lost 
his temper. Yet the vigorous effort of pamphleteers to write 
down John Wesley will be forgotten, along with that of Wesley 
to write down George Washington, for both had a good cause 
and were tremendously successful. Each had reason sometimes 
to be arbitrary ; one over his societies, the other over his troops. 
Each undertook such a vast supervision that he could not be 
wise at all times. The man who could have filled the place 
which each of them held with more wisdom has not yet 
been named. One founded an ecclesiastical, the other a civil, 
republic. 

Wesley was active in settling family disputes — one of the 
most difficult and painful being in his own household, after his 
unfortunate marriage, in 175 1, with a rich widow who had four 
children. He left her wealth and will to herself, and thirty years 
of sorrows and separations were ended when the childless hus- 
band was informed that the jealous wife was quiet in her grave. 
When the exciseman let him know that he had entered no 
plate on the tax-lists he replied that he had two silver spoons 
in London and two others at Bristol, and ' ' I shall not buy any 



DEED OF DECLARATION. 629 

more while so many around me want bread." Like Calvin, he 
lived charitably, and died poor. 

His bands and classes grew into societies and congregations. 
They had their chapels, or were connected with an Anglican 
Church, where the rector favored the movement. For the sac- 
raments they long depended on the clergy of the Established 
Church, of whom a goodly number co-operated with the Wes- 
leys. The lay-preachers were brought under strict rules. In 
1744 the first conference was held in London, by six ministers, 
five of whom were Anglican clergymen. The country was 
divided into circuits, in which the preachers itinerated, each for 
a given time. In 1765 there were twenty-five circuits in Eng- 
land, two in Wales, four in Scotland, and eight in Ireland, and 
there were nearly one hundred lay -preachers.* The numbers 
rapidly increased, amid no small amount of persecution. Riots 
were not rare, and Wesley's life was often in peril. In 1784 
he filed his Deed of Declaration in the Court of Chancery, 
naming one hundred preachers as ''the conference of the people 
called Methodists." Thus the Conference was legalized as their 
supreme ecclesiastical court. This was its great charter. It 
fixed the system. Yet Wesley did not intend to found a sect 
or denomination. He wrote : ' ' We are not dissenters from the 
Church [of England], and will do nothing willingly which tends 
to a separation from it. Our service is not such as supersedes 
the Church service." He and his co-workers made it a rule not 
to hold their meetings at the usual hours of Anglican worship. 

In America the Methodists had prospered greatly, and the 
Revolutionary War virtually broke their connection with the 
western branch of the Anglican Church. The fifteen thou- 
sand members were urgent to have the sacraments administered 
to them, but their preachers were laymen. Wesley entreated 
the English clergy to ordain and send ministers to them, but 
his request was declined. He consulted with the excellent 
John Fletcher, the Vicar of Madeley, from whom came the 
famous theological " Checks," and his co - presbyter, Thomas 
Coke, a doctor of laws. He had long held that, in the New 
Testament, the presbyter was the equal of the bishop. He 

* John Wesley was eager to stop lay preaching, as a rule, until his mother 
said to him, in 1739, "Thomas Maxfield is as surely called of God to preach 
as you are." 



63O HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

quoted the example of the Alexandrian Church, which, at the 
death of a bishop, provided a successor by presbyterial ordina- 
tion. He and some of his co- presbyters of the Anglican 
Church ordained Coke (1784) as a bishop (or superintendent, 
for Wesley objected to using the term bishop) of the Method- 
ists in America. They also ordained two presbyters for the 
same mission. Thus began the Methodist organization in 
America. Adam Clarke, of Irish birth (1762-1832), was then 
an English itinerant. About 1805 he settled in 'London and 
began his chief work, a Commentary on the Holy Bible, which 
"is a wonderful monument of his learning and industry." 

After Wesley's death, at the age of eighty-eight years, in 
1 79 1, his seventy thousand followers in England demanded the 
administration of the sacraments in their own chapels. When 
this was granted by the Conference, in 1795, yet so as not to 
conflict openly with their administration by the rectors of 
churches, the last link with the mother Church was virtually 
severed. Their congregations soon became free churches. In 
law, they were thenceforth a body of Dissenters, with its own 
constitution. Their Conference had a synodical power. Their 
ordained ministers were presbyters, and their bishops were su- 
perintendents, rather than prelates. In the main their system 
was presbyterial. But the body was already divided. Two 
branches were Calvinistic — the Welsh Methodists (see below), 
and Lady Huntingdon's Connection. This enterprising countess 
engaged Whitefield as her chaplain and adviser, and her gener- 
ous patronage won for her a leadership over many of his fol- 
lowers. She built chapels, maintained preachers, and founded 
a college, now at Cheshunt. Rowland Hill ministered in Surrey 
Chapel. The later cleavage in Wesleyan Methodism gave rise 
to the Primitive Methodists, the New Connection, the United 
Free Churches, the Bible Christians, and the Reform Union. 
But nearly three-fifths of the British Methodists are Wesleyans. 
The Methodists have been more successful in Ireland than in 
Scotland. In Britain their press, literature, pulpits, Sunday- 
schools, colleges, agencies of reform and charity, discipline and 
missions, are means and tokens of their continued prosperity. 
Methodism has stimulated other denominations, and been af- 
fected by them ; it has gone almost every-where over the earth ; 
and if it now instructs seventeen millions of people in the 



SCOTTISH EPISCOPALIANS. 63 1 

world, and enrolls one-fourth of them as communicants, it is 
one living witness to the vigor of the great revival in the 
eighteenth century. The monument erected to its founder in 
Westminster Abbey, by the agency of Dean Stanley, is one 
of the many tributes to the moral worth of John Wesley.* 

5. The Welsh Calvinistic Methodists. The first lay-preacher 
of the great revival in Britain was Howell Harris, of Trevecca. 
In 1735 he was studying at Oxford, but he knew not the 
Wesleys. The next year, at the age of twenty-one, he began 
to remedy the ignorance and vices of his countrymen. He 
told the good tidings in the houses of his native parish. He 
opened a day-school. He preached, and drew crowds, before 
Whitefield was heard by the Kingswood miners. "The mag- 
istrates threatened to punish him, the clergy preached against 
him, and the common rabble were generally prepared to dis- 
turb him and to pelt him." He formed societies, and in 1739 
there were nearly three hundred of them. He and two young 
curates were the founders of the Church which finally sepa- 
rated from the Anglican. Their congregations were its mate- 
rials. For years it took the Methodist course. Its leading 
organizer was Rev. Thomas Charles, of Bala. He and the 
earnest vicar, Griffith Jones, wrought a great change in Wales 
by establishing "the circulating schools," nearly thirty -five 
hundred of them, along with Sunday-schools, and a religious 
literature. Mr. Charles was one of the founders of the British 
Bible Society. By degrees he brought the Welsh Methodists 
into a more nearly Presbyterian organization ( 1790-18 11). The 
itinerancy was retained. The Confession of Faith (1823) har- 
monizes with that of Westminster. There are two colleges, at 
Bala and Trevecca; twenty -four presbyteries, and energetic 
missions, home and foreign. This Church has a vigorous 
branch in America. 

IV. The Churches of Scotland. 

1. The Episcopal Church (Anglicaii). In 1661 Charles II, 

who said that presbytery was not a religion for gentlemen, 

consulted with some of the Scottish nobles, and, "with a 

strange mixture of levity and violence, it was resolved to 

* For Statistics, see Note III, at the end of the last chapter. On the Plym- 
outh Brethren, see Note III, to this chapter. 



632 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

establish episcopacy once more in Scotland." Four prelates 
were sent thither, the chief of whom were Sharp, to be primate 
at St. Andrews, and Robert Leighton, who became Archbishop 
of Glasgow. Both had been Presbyterians. The one was am- 
bitious of power, and so abused it that he was assassinated in 
1668; the other was reluctantly obedient to his king. Leighton 
hoped to secure some mode of comprehension, and unite pres- 
bytery and episcopacy. He was the champion of moderation 
and charity. He was not inferior to Jeremy Taylor as a 
preacher. He sought to put forward ministers of piety, sound 
doctrine, ability in the pulpit, and wisdom in political strifes. 
He found that he was to be a tool for utterly uprooting the 
Presbyterian Church, and, when all his efforts to resist such 
wickedness appeared to be in vain, he resigned his high office. 
His Commentary on First Peter has been every-where esteemed 
as a treasury of sound experimental theology. 

The measures of the king and the Scottish Parliament were 
extremely severe. The rescissory act was ' ' only fit to be con- 
cluded after a drunken bout;" for it annulled all acts of Parlia- 
ments from the year 1633, and left the Established Church to 
be overthrown by the new bishops. Presbyteries were forbid- 
den to be held ; in their place dioceses were established. 
Presbyterian ministers were expelled. More than two hundred 
churches were closed in one day, and many more within a few 
weeks. Several counties were deprived of all means of public 
worship, as if they were under a papal interdict of the twelfth 
century. The vacant pulpits in the west were filled chiefly 
with men utterly unfit, mere raw lads from the universities. 
"They were the worst preachers I ever heard," says Burnet, 
"ignorant to a reproach, and many of them openly vicious." 
Decrees worthy of Louis XIV were enacted. Men must re- 
nounce their Scottish covenants ; they were forbidden to write 
or speak against the system now forced on them. The con- 
venticle act forbade every religious meeting in a private house 
at which five persons besides the family were present. Offend- 
ers were liable to heavy fines, or even to be sold as slaves to 
the American colonies. Ministers must be presented to their 
livings by a patron ; if they refused, they must remove to some 
distant place, and the people were forbidden to hear them 
preach. In the south and west nearly three hundred pastors 



THE COVENANTERS. 633 

resigned their livings ; most of those in Edinburgh were ban- 
ished. But the people must attend their parish church, and 
hear a detested liturgy. In 1664 a court of high commission 
began its terrible work. Among the ministers who were tor- 
tured and hanged was the famous Hugh M'Kail. This process 
gave way to a military oppression equal to the dragonnades. 

The Covenanters rose in arms for ''Christ's Crown and Cov- 
enant." The crime of dragooning them was laid upon Graham, 
"the bloody Claverhouse, " or Viscount Dundee, for whom 
apologies are more readily made than believed, except by those 
who think that ability and courage atone for merciless severi- 
ties. The Scots were treated as the worst of rebels. Troops 
scoured the whole country — insolent, lawless, desperate, ter- 
rible, hanging men by the wayside, drowning women, carrying 
off girls, plundering houses, burning cottages, routing bands 
of worshipers, and butchering those who begged for mercy. 
Conventicles were held in fields, forests, and on mountain-sides 
by the persecuted who wandered through the land, hid among 
the rocks, crouched in the marshes, or caught the watchword, 
met in bands, made rough swords, joined the army, went in 
troops to defend their ministers while they preached, and 
fought like heroes for their homes and churches. Some hun- 
dreds of Presbyterians were sold into limited servitude in 
America. The Cameronians, so named from the two brothers 
Cameron, publicly renounced their allegiance to the king as a 
tyrant and usurper, and declared war against all his adherents. 
One of them was slain. Several ministers were hanged ; about 
two hundred others were shut up in dungeons to die, or trans- 
ported to the West Indies. James II somewhat relaxed the 
persecution, in order to save the Romanists in Scotland. In 
1687 the Presbyterians were allowed by the Indulgence to 
preach, but the Cameronians refused the privilege, and one of 
their preachers, Renwick, died a martyr rather than acknowl- 
edge the king's authority. He closed the long list of Scottish 
martyrs to the principles of the covenants. 

William III came in 1688, and nearly the whole nation of 
Scots declared in his favor, except the majority of Episcopa- 
lians, who had about nine hundred ministers and twelve dio- 
ceses. On Christmas, 1688, many of them in the West were 
rabbled, or turned out of their houses into the snow, the doors 



634 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

locked, and the keys taken away by an exasperated populace. 
The Cameronians being charged with these cruelties, were 
rabbled in the North by the Episcopalians. To prevent eject- 
ments of this sort the Rabbling Act of 1698 was passed by the 
Scottish Parliament, which had previously abolished episcopacy, 
and established presbytery. The Episcopalians who refused to 
take the oath of allegiance to William, and those who did not 
conform to presbytery, united with the non-jurors of England. 
While tolerated by the crown, they suffered from two causes: 
the government suspected that they were aiding in plots 
for the restoration of the Stuarts, and the Presbyterians en- 
treated the Scottish Parliament, in 1689, "that no such motion 
of any legal toleration to those of the prelatical principles 
might be entertained ; to tolerate that way would be to estab- 
lish iniquity by a law." The Episcopalians, even the chap- 
lains in the army, were not allowed to use the English liturgy, 
until 1709, when the punishment of Greenshields at Edin- 
burgh for introducing it brought a reaction. An act of tolera- 
tion was passed, but with it the law of patronage was restored. 
By this the patron or land-owner controlled the Church on his 
estates ; he might place in it a clergyman very obnoxious to 
the congregation. Episcopal ministers, conforming to the let- 
ter of the law, were pastors in Presbyterian churches. By this 
scheme episcopacy and presbytery were both injured. 

In the rebellions of 17 14 and 1745 the non-conforming 
Episcopalians were identified with the political party of the 
Stuarts or Jacobites, and their Church was nearly destroyed. 
In 1788 their clergy submitted, took the oath of allegiance to 
George III, and were soon relieved of all penalties of the law. 
They were not allowed to officiate in England until '1840, and 
then under certain restrictions. They resumed the titles which 
they had been compelled to lay aside. They now have about 
two hundred and thirty clergymen. One of their seven bishops, 
during the present century, Dr. Torry, began his ministry in a 
kitchen, and for years had no better place for his services. 
But he became the Bishop of Perth, and was active in reviving 
the cathedral system. 

The Roman Catholics have an archbishop (1878) and about 
two hundred and sixty clergy in Scotland, with a membership 
largely of Irish emigrants. 



PRESBYTERIANS. 635 

2. The Established Presbyterian Church of Scotland and its 
branches. We have just noticed the military efforts of the 
Stuarts to overthrow Presbyterianism. William III restored it 
in order to end ' ' nearly thirty years of the most frightful mis- 
government ever seen in any part of Great Britain." Macaulay 
says that "if the Revolution had produced no other effect 
than that of freeing the Scotch from the yoke of an establish- 
ment which they detested, and giving them one to which they 
were attached, it would have been one of the happiest events 
in our history."* William had serious difficulties. In England 
the divine right of episcopacy was urged ; in Scotland it was the 
divine right of presbytery. He did not believe in the divine 
right of any form of Church government. The Church which 
was a majority in one country was a minority in the other. In 
England the Presbyterians were happy to be tolerated ; in 
Scotland they were hardly tolerant of prelacy. He did not 
restore the system on the basis of 1638, for the Solemn League 
and Covenant had lost its force as a compact. In the settle- 
ment William Carstares, a minister of great diplomatic ability, 
was a royal counselor and mediator. He prepared the way 
for the conformity of many of the Scotch Episcopalians. 

Only sixty Presbyterian ministers remained in the country, 
true to their principles. Their General Assembly, unable to 
meet for thirty-seven years, was convened in 1690, and these 
veterans began the work of restoration. The majority of them 
were old Resolutioners. Instead of retaliating on those breth- 
ren who had adopted episcopacy, they offered them as easy 
terms as possible in reconforming. The Episcopalians might 
have their theories of divine right, but the question now was 
simply one of Scottish right. They must give up prelacy in 
practice, and acknowledge presbytery as the legalized system in 
Scotland. Out of all this grew a series of complicated events. 
There were four results: (1) The Church was more fully under 
the control of the state than ever before. (2) A tendency to 
cleavage was soon manifest. One party, representing the old 
Protesters, complained that the crown was supreme over the 
Church ; that the Solemn League and Covenant was ignored ; 

* " Four causes of Scotch progress: The establishment of the kirk, the 
parochial schools, the destruction of the feudal privileges, and free trade." 
(Lecky, Hist. Eng. in Eighteenth Century.) 



636 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

that prelacy was re-established in England and Ireland, and 
tolerated in Scotland ; that men, who had conformed to epis- 
copacy, and had aided in the late persecutions, were now 
restated in the presbyteries ; and that they must sanction all 
these alleged errors by taking an oath of allegiance to the gov- 
ernment. The few ministers of this party finally submitted to 
the establishment. But the lay dissenters — the Cameronians, 
full seven thousand strong — stood aloof, held their meetings, 
organized fellowship societies, offered petitions and protests, 
prayed and waited in patient faith for some ministers to join 
their ranks. At length Rev. John M'Millan took up their 
cause. He prosecuted it with such vigor that he gave offense, 
and was irregularly deposed for his "faithfulness to reformation 
principles." In 1706 he became the clerical leader of the dis- 
senting party. He toiled on almost alone until 1743, when a 
small presbytery was organized, and in it the Reformed Presby- 
rian Church began its separate existence. It claimed to stand 
on the basis of 1638, and perpetuate the Covenanted Church 
of Scotland. The covenants were treated as terms of com- 
munion. Its members refused to vote or hold civil offices. 
They were non-jurors. It was strongly opposed to lay-patron- 
age. These Covenanters were not alone in their separation. 
The cleavage was due to the civil law rather than to the doctri- 
nal system. It produced several distinct Presbyterian bodies.* 
(3) Conflicting elements were brought into the Established 
Church. Among those who conformed were many of those 
"worst preachers" Burnet ever heard. In 17 12 the General 
Assembly said to Queen Anne, "Since our late happy estab- 
lishment there have been taken in and continued hundreds of 
dissenting ministers on the easiest terms." Two parties, the 
liberal and the strict, soon appeared. 

(4) Moderatism began its course. It 17 14 John Simpson, 

*!. The Established Church. 2. The Reformed or Covenanters, 1743. 3. 
The Secession 1734, Synod in 1746, led by E. Erskine and the Marrowmen, and 
opposed to lay patronage. Divided in 1747, on citizen's oath, into (1) Anti- 
burgers, or General Associate Synod, and (2) Burghers, or Associate Synod ; 
and this, in 1796, into New Light and Old Light. 4. Relief Church, 1761 ; 
Thomas Gillespie and others against lay patronage and moderatism. 5. The 
Free Church, 1843. 6. The United Presbyterian Church, formed in 1847 by 
the union of the Secession and Relief Churches. There have been recent tend- 
encies to other unions. 



SECESSION CHURCH. 637 

professor of theology at Glasgow, was accused of teaching 
Arminian doctrines. The assembly staved off the case for 
three years, and dismissed it by forbidding him to use certain 
ambiguous phrases. He was suspended from his professorship 
in 1728 on charges of Arianism. Meanwhile the assembly dealt 
more promptly with the presbytery of Auchterarder for requir- 
ing a candidate for licensure, William Craig, to sign this for- 
mula: "I believe that it is not sound and orthodox to teach 
that we must forsake sin in order to our coming to Christ and 
instating us in covenant with God." This was called the 
Auchterarder Creed, and declared to be most detestable. But 
the presbytery satisfactorily explained it to mean that in coming 
to Christ we come with all our sins in order to be pardoned by 
him and sanctified. 

This warm dispute, which extended into the coffee-houses 
of London, was not quieted, when a hotter controversy arose 
about the "Marrow of Modern Divinity," a book written in 
1646 by Edward Fisher, of Oxford, commended by several 
Westminster divines, and reprinted in Scotland, where it became 
very popular. The Scottish Assembly sternly condemned it as 
teaching general atonement, assurance the essence of faith, 
holiness not necessary to salvation, fear and hope not motives 
to Christian obedience, and the moral law not a rule of Chris- 
tian life. The ministers were forbidden to commend the book 
by voice or pen; they must warn the people against it.* But 
it was all the more in demand, and was warmly defended by 
twelve ministers, among whom were Thomas Boston, author of 
the "Fourfold State of Man," and Ebenezer Erskine, of Stir- 
ling, the bold assailant of lay-patronage and lax theology. 
Erskine was striking into the path of secession when he and 
several of his brethren were subjected to trials which resulted in 
their deposition, in 1 740, by the assembly. Already they had 
begun the Secession Church, which had its own synod in 1745, 
and continued its separate existence for a century (1847) when 
it formed a union with the Relief Church. The causes of these 
divisions were lay-patronage, ecclesiastical rigor, civil interfer- 
ence, and moderatism. 

The great revival came. Ralph Erskine had few equals as 
a field-preacher. He and his brother, Ebenezer, invited White- 

* It is republished by the Presbyterian Board, Philadelphia. 



638 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

field to aid them. He met them and their co-presbyters in 
1 74 1 at Dumferline. They claimed that he must indorse their 
principles and confine his labors to their sect as "the Lord's 
people." He listened to their instructions and wrote: "I 
retired, I wept, I prayed, and after preaching in the open fields 
I sat down and dined with them, and then took a final farewell." 
These good men and others of the Reformed Church denounced 
him in terms that make us stare, and observed a fast on account 
of the popular enthusiasm in the "Methodist revival." Many 
pulpits of the Established Church were opened to him during 
his brief sojourn. He was not yet at Cambuslang, where the 
pastor, M'Culloch, found his people anxious for increased relig- 
ious services, and many of them inquiring the way of life. As 
this pastor preached every evening, some hearers were agitated 
by wild raptures and convulsions. When the Spring days grew 
fair the meetings were held in the open field. Ministers came 
from the whole country to see the Lord's strange work and test 
its spiritual reality. Among them were Maclaurin and Gillies, 
of Glasgow, Willison, of Dundee, Webster and John Erskine, of 
Edinburgh, lights of the time. They preached to the people, 
convinced that it was a genuine work of divine mercy. White- 
field returned from England and assisted in the wonderful work. 
But sectarianism and moderatism were scarcely shaken. 
Patronage was a monstrous foe of the Church, when a candi- 
date is represented as saying to a parish: "I'll be your minister 
in spite of your teeth ; I '11 have the charge of your souls whether 
ye will or not;" and when Dr. William Robertson could assist 
the presbytery in forcing an appointee upon a people who 
would leave him to read his homily to empty pews. For thirty 
years Robertson ruled the assembly of the Established Church 
as Pitt ruled the House of Commons. He founded a new 
school in history along with David Hume, but he could not 
prevent his disciples from drifting into infidelity. When a rising 
party urged that subscription to the Confession of Faith be 
abolished, he retired in alarm and disgust from public life 
(1780). He was a prince in groups of the boldest thinkers that 
Scotland had yet produced : Carmichael, one of the founders of 
the Scottish philosophy,* Reid, the metaphysician, George 

* Francis Hutcheson, professor in the Glasgow University, from 1729 to 1747, 
has been called " the father of the modern school of philosophy in Scotland." 



SPIRIT OF MISSIONS. 639 

Campbell, who replied to Hume's essay on miracles, Beattie, 
Ferguson, and Hugh Blair, the great moderate preacher. "It 
may be doubted whether Blair's sermons ever converted an 
infidel, reclaimed a sinner, or impressed with sentiments of true 
devotion one human heart." Socinianism had its way among 
the New-light men of Ayrshire, and these ministers led Robert 
Burns into their society, tainted his poetic genius with skeptic- 
ism and immorality, and made him the prodigal son of the 
Church of Scotland. 

The spirit of missions began to be revived at the time when 
the French Revolution seemed to threaten the destruction of 
the Church and of civilization. A missionary society was 
formed at Edinburgh, and its active president was Dr. John 
Erskine, a profound theologian, whom every body loved for 
his benevolence. In the General Assembly of 1796 the question 
of raising missionary funds was under discussion. Dr. George 
Hill, whose Lectures in Divinity have come down to us, and 
who was Robertson's successor in his influence, had thrown 
some ice upon the proposal to take up collections in the 
churches. Hamilton spoke boldly against foreign missions, 
according to the general sentiment of that age, and sat down. 
Dr. John Erskine rose, an old man, thin and pale, and said: 
"Moderator, rax [reach] me that Bible." He made an elo- 
quent appeal, but the majority voted against direct and practical 
effort. During the next thirty years a more evangelical spirit 
pervaded the moderate party. Dr. Hill greatly promoted it. 
Dr. Inglis employed voice and pen in favor of missions, and 
the Scots nobly came up to the work. In 1829 Alexander 
Duff went to Calcutta, the first missionary ever sent forth by a 
Protestant National Church. His apostolic labors of nearly fifty 
years contributed powerfully to the advance of Christian civil- 
ization in India, and to the warmer sympathies of Christendom 
towards the heathen world. 

A spiritual morning had dawned upon Scotland. The Hal- 
danes, wealthy laymen, strong Calvinists, began their work in 
1796, and a goodly band of earnest men joined them as they 
rode over all the land, preaching, founding Sunday-schools, 
distributing tracts, exposing the deadness of existing orthodoxy 
and concealed errors, and setting forth a vital Christianity. We 
have already noticed them as Independents. They became 



64O HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

pastors and authors. It is said that Robert expended one 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars in erecting chapels and in 
promoting the Gospel in Geneva and France. They brought 
Rowland Hill into Scotland, where he drew large audiences, 
but his oddities and oral crusade upon the Moderates and the 
Scottish habits injured his influence. In 181 1 Andrew Thomp- 
son and Thomas M'Crie began to employ the press in order to 
restore the principles of the Reformation in the days of Knox 
and Melville. Soon the eloquence of Chalmers was heard, and 
no human voice was ever more powerful in Scotland. 

Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), the son of a merchant at 
Anstruther in Fife, evinced a genius for nearly every kind of 
scholarship while a student and professor in the University of 
St. Andrews. While a young pastor at Kilmany he became 
widely known by the vigor of his pen. In 18 15 he took charge 
of the Tron Church in Glasgow. His new spiritual life, evan- 
gelical doctrine, warmth of soul, interest in all humane affairs, 
the blending of science and Christianity, the wide range of his 
thoughts and schemes, and his tremendous eloquence, made 
him the most celebrated pulpit orator of Scotland, if not of 
Great Britain. Lord Jeffrey said: "He buries his adversaries 
under the fragments of burning mountains." When his ad- 
dresses in London were applauded by the best judges of real 
merit, he could say that human praises were ' ' but the hosannas 
of a driveling generation." He was five years professor of 
moral philosophy at St. Andrews, and then, from 1828 to 1843, 
professor of theology at Edinburgh. He threw a new life into 
the evangelical party of the National Church, became its chief, 
and, when necessity compelled the departure, he and his asso- 
ciates led part of it en masse into a new organization.* 

3. The Free Church of Scotland. The direct causes of its 
formation were in the abuse of patronage and the interfer- 



* Men who represent periods and movements in the Scottish Church: John 
Knox represents the Reformation, 1525-75; Andrew Melville, the introduction 
of a purer Presbyterianism, 1575— 1638; Alexander Henderson and Samuel Ruth- 
erford, the Solemn League and Covenant and Westminster Confession 1638-60; 
Archbishops Robert Leighton and Sharpe, the enforcement of episcopacy upon 
Scotland, 1660-88 ; William Carstares, the restoration of Presbyterianism, 1690; 
Ebenezer Erskine, the tendencies to disruption, 1734; William Robertson, the 
Moderatism of the Established Church, 1750-1840; Alexander Duff, the spirit 
of missions; Thomas Chalmers, the Free Church, 1843. 



CHALMERS. 64 1 

ence of the civil courts. In the General Assembly of 1833 Dr. 
Chalmers offered a motion, which Lord Moncrieff seconded, 
"that it is, and has been ever since the Reformation, a fixed 
principle in the law of this Church, that no minister shall be 
intruded into any pastoral charge contrary to the will of the 
congregation." The motion was not carried until the next 
year, and then in the form of the Veto Act. By this act the 
majority of a congregation might disapprove of a candidate 
presented to it sls pastor, and in such a case the presbytery 
would not install him. It was also claimed that a parish, asking 
or having no benefice from the state, might have its chosen 
pastor installed without the assent of the civil court. But the 
civil court forbade the Presbytery of Irvine to install a man at 
Stewarton, "where there was no benefice, no right of patron- 
age, no stipend, no manse or glebe, and no place of worship." 
The court ordered the Presbytery of Strathbogie to install a 
candidate at Marnoch, contrary to the will of the people. The 
court recognized, as in good standing, seven ministers whom 
the presbytery had deposed. These are samples of the civil 
interferences. Parliament granted no relief. When the civil 
court shut the doors of certain churches against such men as 
Drs. Chalmers and Gordon, they went and preached in the 
barns and fields. Thus the court lost its* powers; its decrees 
were "held in contempt by the people. The whole country was 
agitated. The two parties seemed to be quite equally divided. 
All efforts to compromise the difficulties were fruitless. 
The final issue came in 1843, in the General Assembly at Edin- 
burgh, when that old city was full of excitement on one great 
question: "Will these four hundred non-intrusionists secede 
from the Established Church?" Some said that not forty of 
them would go out. Dr. Welsh, the moderator, took the chair, 
invoked the divine presence, and calmly said that the assembly 
could not be properly constituted without violating the terms 
of union between Church and state. He read a protest against 
any further proceedings, bowed to the representative of the 
crown, stepped down into the aisle, and walked toward the 
door. To follow him was to forsake the old Church, its livings, 
salaries, manses, pulpits, and parishes. Dr. Chalmers had 
seemed like a lion in a reverie, and all eyes were turned upon 
him. Would he give up his chair of theology? He seized his 

41 



642 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

hat, took the new departure, and after him went Gordon and 
Buchanan, Macfarlane and MacDonald, Guthrie, Candlish and 
Cunningham, and more than four hundred more ministers, with 
a host of elders. A cheer burst from the galleries. In the 
street the expectant crowd parted, and admired the heroic 
procession as it passed. Lord Jeffrey was sitting in his room 
quietly reading when some one rushed in saying, ' ' What do 
you think? More than four hundred of them have gone out." 
Springing to his feet he exclaimed, "I'm proud of my coun- 
try. There is not another land on earth where such a deed 
could have been done!" 

It was a cloudy day, and there must have been sad hearts 
in that company as they marched to a hall, into which three 
thousand people packed themselves. Dr. Chalmers was chosen 
moderator by acclamation. He read the Psalm, 

"O send thy light forth and thy truth, 
Let them be guides to me; 
And bring me to thy holy hill, 
Even where thy dwellings be." 

When the multitude rose to sing these words, a sudden burst 
of sunlight filled the room. It was heaven's smile upon those 
who had accepted free poverty in escaping from oppressive pat- 
ronage. These men had work to do and trials to endure. 
They had to organize Churches, build chapels, provide salaries, 
rear colleges, and secure dwelling-places. The toil of riding 
thirty miles and preaching three times in one day, and the joy 
of administering the Lord's Supper in the open field to a band 
who had no house of worship, were well known to Thomas 
Guthrie and James M'Cosh, before the world heard of the one 
as the mighty preacher, and the other as the clear metaphysi- 
cian. A noble people responded liberally to every appeal. 
The English Churches, especially the Independents and Wes- 
leyans, sent relief. Soon there were six hundred congregations, 
the number still increasing. The Free Church had no lack. 
It became noted for its wealth, enterprise, intelligence, spirit- 
uality, and power. Dr. Duff cast in his lot with it, sure that 
it would support his missions in India. In its new college at 
Edinburgh, Dr. Chalmers was the first professor of theology. 
In his old age he resigned his chair, and began his city mission 
labors at West Port, a district notorious for its dens of vice. 



THE FREE CHURCH— THE IRISH PRESBYTERIANS. 643 

He founded there a Sunday-school, a library, a savings-bank, 
and working houses. Eminent men are filling the places of 
the deceased fathers of the Free Church. But there were 
some few brave men who hoped for no successors in their lot. 
They perished in helpless heroism. One of them was expelled 
from a delightful manse. Alone and diffident, he did not make 
known his wants. He crept away and stayed in a wretched 
garret, sleeping next to a cold slate roof, and his amiable face 
whitening with frost. His body was soon in the grave. 

The Free Church has about one-third of the three thousand 
Presbyterian ministers of Scotland. It has three theological 
seminaries. It is prosperously represented wherever Scottish 
Presbyterianism exists : in England, Ireland, Canada, Nova 
Scotia, and Australia. In some of these countries it has been 
joined with the United Presbyterian Church. It has its suc- 
cessful missions in heathen lands. We may say of all the 
Protestant Churches in Scotland, that the heated ecclesiastical 
strifes of the past have glided into fraternal discussions. Strong 
minds still hold debate in metaphysics, ethics, Biblical criticism, 
and theology. The spirituality of M'Cheyne and the Bonars is 
still a genial sunlight upon the land. Edinburgh stands as one 
of the religious and literary centers of Christendom. 

V. The Churches of Ireland. 

The Irish Presbyterians suffered acutely under the later 
Stuarts. Even the admired bishop, Jeremy Taylor, suspended 
thirty-six of their ministers. An Act of Uniformity was put in 
force. Not more than eight Presbyterian ministers conformed. 
The rest bravely refused, and they were driven out of the estab- 
lishment. They preached in private houses and in barns ; they 
were fined and imprisoned, until the bishops saw that they were 
provoking a reaction. The government now permitted them 
to preach, erect chapels, and resume their presbyteries, and 
allowed them a yearly regium donum, or royal gift ; but the 
Stuarts were slow paymasters. They became a separate body. 
In 1688 they were the truest Irish friends of William III, aided 
him in his triumphs over the Jacobites, and won splendid fame 
in their defense of Derry. The new king doubled the regium 
donum, and it was continued until 1871, when they were dises- 
tablished. Not until 17 19 did they receive the legal benefits 



644 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of the Toleration Act. The Methodist revival brought showers 
of blessing upon Ireland, and more spiritual union among 
Protestants. 

The Arianism avowed by Thomas Emlyn, in 1702, was not 
uprooted by his imprisonment. Men of his views, "the New 
Lights," increased in numbers, keeping pace with the Unita- 
rians in England. Questions of subscription to the Confession 
were often raised during the eighteenth century ; modifications 
were proposed; evasions were common. Subscription fell into 
disuse. The non-subscribers formed ' ' the Presbytery of An- 
trim." The Scottish seceders and covenanters came (1740-61), 
steadily grew, and staunchly maintained the Westminster doc- 
trines. But outside of their body, the Unitarians held their 
place in the Presbyterian Church until Dr. Henry Cooke be- 
came the champion of orthodoxy. Inquiry was made into the 
doctrines of ministers and professors of theology. In 1829 the 
Unitarians, hard pressed and unwilling to subscribe the Con- 
fession, withdrew from the Synod of Ulster. They declined 
in numbers, and now have about forty congregations, and less 
than ten thousand adherents. 

Again a spiritual revival came upon the Irish Presbyterian 
Church. It formed a union with the Secession Synod, which 
had risen to a higher position in the land, largely through the 
energy, eloquence, and scholarship of Professor John Edgar. 
He threw his zeal into all humane movements. He was the first 
man in the old world to form Temperance Societies (1829). He 
went through the British Isles, addressed immense audiences, 
and enlisted thousands in the great reform. He used pen and 
press to advance it. His success was wonderful.* 

In 1840 the Presbyterian Church organized her General As- 
sembly. The academy at Belfast developed into a vigorous 
Theological Seminary, and Queen's College. In 1865 Magee 
College was established at Londonderry, perhaps as one of the 
fruits of the glorious revival, which gave new strength to all 
the truly Irish Protestants. Notwithstanding the great emigra- 



* The Temperance Reform, as a specially public movement, rose in America 
about 1808, when societies began to be formed. It was under Christian direc- 
tion. In 1829 almost the entire Church was enlisted in it, and with great 
success. Since then it has passed through various phases, from that of moral 
suasion to that of state legislation. 



FATHER MATHEW. 645 

tion, for a century, the Irish Presbyterians have now about 
six hundred and fifty ministers, with active home and foreign 
missions. Efforts have been made to enlighten the Roman 
Catholics by missions, schools, Bibles, and literature in the Irish 
language, but conversions have been comparatively few. In 
1795 the Parliament founded Maynooth College, in which the 
Roman Catholic priests are educated. It recently had five 
hundred students. One of its earliest students was Theobald 
Mathew, who became a Capuchin Monk, a priest at Cork in 
1 8 14, and thenceforth an earnest reformer. He was singu- 
larly gentle, affable, benevolent, and eloquent. Father Mathew 
won the hearts of rich and poor, as he founded schools for 
children, corrected many abuses, and, through the influence of 
a wise Quaker, became "the Apostle of Temperance," bring- 
ing one hundred and fifty thousand members into his Total-ab- 
stinence Society at Cork (1838). He extended his efforts in 
this reform to the chief cities of Ireland, England, and Scot- 
land. His name is borne by temperance societies in America, 
and one of the foes to Irish prosperity has been severely 
wounded. The Roman Catholics of Ireland have long been 
restless under the civil rule of the Protestants, whom they far 
exceed in numbers.* 

In the time of Oliver Cromwell the Baptists organized 
Churches in about thirty districts of Ireland. Their later period 
of prosperity dates from the efforts of the Haldanes, and of 
Dr. Alexander Carson, who left the Presbyterian Church, and 
attained wide celebrity by his scholarship and writings. He 
died in 1844, leaving this saying as one of his last: "A man's 
usefulness expires when he loses humility." The Independents 
are about equal in numbers to the Baptists. 

*The estimate of population, not membership, in 1875 ^ s: Roman Catho- 
lics, 4,150,857; Protestant Episcopalians, 667,998; Presbyterians, 497,648; all 
others, 95,864. Since 1861 the proportion of Roman Catholics has diminished 
one per cent; that of Protestants, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians has slightly 
increased. The reduced number of Roman Catholics is in a great measure 
accounted for by emigration. The direful famine of 1847 "inflicted on Irish 
Romanism the heaviest blow it had sustained since the time of the great 
Rebellion" (1641). The Protestants won favor by their prompt charities, and 
America vied with England in sending relief. 



646 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



NOTES. 

I. The Friends, Seekers, or Quakers ; a society rather than a Church. 
They maintain that the Reformation was a gradual work, completed by 
George Fox (1624-90), who was reserved to teach the spirituality of relig- 
ion. Fox was a shoemaker and reader of the Bible, when he reached the 
conviction that "it is not the Scripture, but it is the Holy Spirit by which 
the holy men of God gave forth the Scriptures, whereby opinions, religions, 
and judgments are to be tried." His journeys over England, his teachings, 
and his imprisonments form a touching story. The doctrines of his fol- 
lowers were brought into a system by Robert Barclay, of Scotland, William 
Penn, and George Keith, before the latter was disowned, in Pennsylvania, 
for his strange views and spirit, and he joined the Episcopal Church. They 
held that the Holy Spirit, through the Bible and by continued revelation, 
or even directly, enlightens and sanctifies all who receive him. They re- 
jected an official human ministry, formulated theology, creeds, the sacra- 
ments, formal worship, churchism, oaths, tithes, service in war, and the con- 
ventional rules of society. They, however, had their own rules for religious 
meetings, worship, marriage, dress, and social life, and these rules come to 
have a binding force. The common dress of Fox's time came to be their 
peculiar fashion ; custom grew into formalism, and opinion into a creed. 
Among them now a liberal party adopt modern customs and lax views ; 
a more evangelical party is aggressive with the press, Sunday-schools, 
and earnest preaching. Their spirit of peace and humanity has distin- 
guished them. 

II. The Irvingites. Edward Irving was deposed in 1833 for holding 
that Christ's human nature was capable of sin, and for allowing persons to 
exercise such gifts as the early Montanists claimed. After his death, in 
1834, Dr. John Cumming, of London, said of him, "I can not but grieve 
at the awful eclipse under which he came. . . . He is gone to the 
grave, I have reason to believe, with a broken heart." His followers car- 
ried his views to an extreme in what they call "the Catholic Apostolic 
Church," with its twelve apostles, its divinely illuminated prophets, its evan- 
gelists and pastors or angels, its complicated ritualism and its crude mil- 
lenarianism. The liturgy contains Jewish, Anglican, and Romish elements. 
The Apostolic, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds are avowed. In their 
missionary efforts they have had most success in Germany, where the his- 
torian, H. W. Thiersch, is "the proper Tertullian of this modern Monta- 
nism." They have few adherents in America. 

III. The Plymouth Brethren were led chiefly by John Darby, who left 
the Anglican ministry, about 1830, and traveled widely in Europe. Socie- 
ties were established about the same time at Plymouth and Dublin. In 
1850 they claimed to have one hundred and fifty places of worship in 
Britain. Many of them are Calvinist in theology, but they have no pub- 
lished creed, and scarcely a Church polity. Many of them are said to 
"believe that all disciples have a right to teach, and that even recognized 



NOTES ON CHAPTER XXIII. 647 

teachers or preachers should receive no pecuniary support. They believe 
in eternal justification and imputed sanctification ; in the identification of 
the believer with the perfection of Christ ; that Christianity is in ruins, as 
appears from the separate sects ; that believers should withdraw from the 
Churches ; that there is a complete abrogation of the law and entire deliv- 
erance from sin, so far as the believer is concerned; that sin is not essen- 
tially evil ; that repentance is not a requirement of Scripture ; that regenera- 
tion and progress in holiness are not to be insisted on, and, that ere the end 
of all things shall come, there shall be a secret meeting of the Lord with 
his disciples previous to his manifestation to the world." They have as- 
sumed to be evangelists or revivalists, and to have a mission in traveling 
among all nations for the propagation of their doctrines. 



648 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 



Chapter XXIV. 

THE EXODE TO AMERICA. 
1492-1787. 

The exode from Europe to America is one of the greatest 
events in all human history. The crimes of Europe were a 
chief cause of it. Two new continents were added to the field 
of the Christian Church. Her influence upon the native tribes 
is a minor element in the account, for some of them perished 
or remained in barbarism ; others were imperfectly converted, 
and they formed no civilized, self-controlling nations. The 
nationalities and the Churches are of European origin. No 
really new system of Christian theology or Church polity has 
originated in America ; the transplanted systems have been 
somewhat modified. 

The Roman Catholic Church was the pioneer on this conti- 
nent. Spain claimed the new world by right of discovery; 
and the pope, by the assumption of universal supremacy. 
They crushed out the colonies attempted by Huguenots under 
the patronage of Coligny and Calvin. By means of the search 
for gold, of conquests, of missions, and of colonies, the Roman 
Church gained the power over the West Indies, Mexico, and 
South America. In them there was no progressive civilization 
until the present century, when several republics threw off the 
yoke of Spain, attained a more constitutional liberty, and 
opened doors for Protestant missions. They contain about 
one hundred and eighty-one thousand Protestants and forty 
millions of Roman Catholics. 

The temperate zone of North America was providentially 
reserved mainly for Protestants, the descendants of that Ger- 
manic race most fond of independence. English law and 
language predominated. In the new soil they planted the 
Protestant Churches of their father-lands, and most of these 
were long identified with the early colonies. 



VIRGINIA— MARYLAND. 649 

I. Colonies which formed the United States. 

1. In 1606 about one hundred cavaliers built Jamestown, the 
first settlement in Virginia. Intent on fortune, and impatient 
of rule, they finally expelled their governor, John Smith, a man 
of wide adventure and rare genius. Robert Hunt, an Episco- 
palian, was their pastor, willing to share in their trials. Smith 
says of a wretched tent: "This was our church till wee built a 
homely thing like a barn, set upon cratchets, covered with 
rafts, sedge, and earth : the best of our houses of the like curi- 
osity, but the most part farre much worse workmanship, that 
could neither well defend wind nor raine : yet wee had daily 
Common Prayer morning and evening, every Sunday two ser- 
mons, and every three months the holy communion, till our 
minister died." Other ministers came, with other colonists. 
John Rolf is said to have won Pocahontas to the Christian 
faith, and their happy marriage secured the friendship of the 
Indians, among whom missions were unsuccessfully attempted. 
The Dutch sold twenty negroes to the planters in 16 19, and 
thus began the system of slavery which existed for nearly two 
hundred and fifty years. The Episcopal Church was established 
by law. Among the twenty thousand people in Virginia, in 
1648, there were adherents of various creeds, and they suffered 
greatly during the reign of the restored Stuarts. The contest 
for religious liberty became sharper than in any other colony. 
Governor Berkeley, in 1671, complained that the worst minis- 
ters were sent to Virginia. He would pay them better "if 
they would pray oftener and preach less." He wrote: "Every 
man, according to his ability, instructs his children. But I 
thank God there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope 
we shall not have these hundred years ; for learning has brought 
disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing 
has divulged them and libels against the best government. God 
keep us from both!" After a rule of thirty-five years he left 
for England, and bonfires signified the popular joy. Charles II 
said of him, ' ' That old fool has taken away more lives, in that 
naked land, than I for the death of my father." In 1688 wiser 
men founded the College of William and Mary, at Williams- 
burg, and James Blair was its president during fifty years. 

2. Maryland was granted to Lord Baltimore, a Roman Cath- 



650 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

olic, who adopted the plan of a colony in which all Christians 
(not infidels) might have refuge and freedom. His son, Cecil 
Calvert, undertook to execute the noble designs (1632-50), at 
the very time when Roger Williams offered still larger liberty 
to all settlers in Rhode Island. But factious spirits brought 
revolution. The Roman Catholics were disfranchised. The 
Church of England was established, but all Protestants were 
tolerated.* 

3. New Yoj'k began its history, in 1609-14, with the Dutch 
traders who extended the province of New Netherlands from 
Delaware Bay to Lake Champlain. It took fourteen years to 
give New York City two hundred and seventy souls, including 
some negro slaves. The missionary, Michaelius, preached in 
tent, barn, or fort, to men who were more eager to load a ship 
with furs than to build a church. Dominie Bogardus boldly 
denounced the rapacity of the governors when misrule threat- 
ened all true interests. New settlers came of almost every 
European clime and language. The directors thus ordered the 
governors : ' ' Let every peaceful citizen enjoy freedom of con- 
science. This maxim has made our city the asylum for fugi- 
tives from every land ; tread in its steps, and you shall be 
blessed." But civil rights were limited. The Mohawks, among 
whom missions were attempted, said: "The Dutch are our 
brethren. With them we keep but one council - fire ; we are 
united by a covenant chain." The English secured control of 
the province, after the Stuarts regained the throne. Charles 
II gave to his brother James, Duke of York, the whole coun- 
try from the Connecticut River to the Delaware. The Episco- 
pal Church, to which not one -tenth of the people adhered, 
was established by law. Other Protestant Churches were 
barely tolerated. 

Gustavus Adolphus, who is described as the greatest bene- 
factor in the line of Swedish kings, proposed to found in the 
New World a state that should be free from foreign rule, and 
offer liberty to all Protestants. He fell in the Thirty Years' 
War. His chancellor, the statesman Oxenstiern, attempted to 
fulfill the design. In 1637 a former governor of the Dutch 
colony led about seven hundred Lutheran Swedes to the west 

* Maryland was " the fruitful seed-bed" of Romanism, Methodism, and 
Presbyterianism, in the United States of America. 



NEW ENGLAND. 65 I 

side of the lower Delaware River. The people of New Sweden 
deserve renown for their opposition to human slavery, their 
peace and industry, their kindly treatment of the Indians and 
their efforts to convert them, their zeal for education, and their 
magnanimity to all Protestants. Their lands passed to the 
Duke of York, and their liturgy was overshadowed by that of 
the English when episcopacy was legalized. They were dis- 
persed in other colonies. 

4. New England received the defeated heroes who came out 
of the struggle between the Protestant non-conformists and the 
Anglican Church. Its first colonists left England to escape 
oppression ; their brethren remained, and won the great revolu- 
tion. When Prince wrote* its history he said: "It concerneth 
New England always to remember that she is a religious plan- 
tation, and not one of trade. The profession of purity of doc- 
trine, worship, and discipline, is written upon her forehead." 
There were four main centers of colonization, with four marked 
varieties of Church polity. 

(1) Plymouth was settled by the Pilgrims — one hundred and 
two souls — who landed there, December 22, 1620, from the 
Mayflower. In her cabin, with their wives and children around 
them, William Bradford and his brother elders had settled their 
polity of Church and state on the basis of a democracy and 
constitutional liberty. Their pastor, Robert Cushman, saw 
nearly half of them laid in the grave within four months. The 
first sermon printed in the colonies was from him. Captain 
Miles Standish made battles and treaties with the Indians, who 
kept the peace for fifty years, until King Philip's war. In 1630 
the town had three hundred people, with their church and 
school, their farms, herds, and extending commerce. They 
were not simply Puritans ; they were separatists, independent 
of all other Churches, but claiming to agree very nearly with 
the French Presbyterians. They expelled Lyford, not so much 
for being an Episcopalian as for sedition and immorality. They 
did not limit the right of suffrage to Church members. They 
were unusually tolerant. "They were never betrayed into the 
excesses of religious persecution, though they sometimes per- 
mitted a disproportion between punishment and crime." 

(2) The Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1628 John Endicott 
and his band founded Salem, from which the central power of 



652 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

government was transferred to Boston. Ship-loads of settlers 
came, and towns grew up rapidly. The government was quite 
theocratic under such governors as John Winthrop and Thomas 
Dudley. Such ministers as Higginson and Cotton had a strong 
hand in civil affairs. The elders were virtually the legislators. 
The state must serve the Church ; a vote in the one required a 
membership in the other. They were loyal to the English 
crown, while opposing the despotism of the Stuarts. When 
the Long Parliament attempted to revoke their charter, they 
rose and denied its supreme jurisdiction, virtually saying, "Let 
not our children lament that our liberties were lost at the very 
time when England recovered her own." To them and other 
colonies Cromwell was a benefactor ; he left them the freedom 
of industry, trade, commerce, religion, and government. 

They were Puritans, non- conformists, but not separatists. 
They claimed to be a part of the Anglican Church, but dis- 
carded the liturgy. With their brethren in England, they 
hoped to see that Church brought over to their own polity and 
doctrine. They rejected both prelacy and presbytery, but had 
elders and synods, which exercised high power for nearly a 
century. In 1648 their synod at Cambridge made their Plat- 
form, adopting substantially the Westminster Confession. The 
Shorter Catechism was generally taught. When episcopacy 
was restored in England, in 1660, they found themselves to be 
Congregationalists, and they established their system by law in 
their colony. Mistaking toleration for indorsement, they were 
severe upon Anabaptists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Quakers, and 
the followers of Anne Hutchinson, who eloquently taught 
Antinomianism. It was a time when so-called witches were 
burnt in England and Scotland, and these Puritans executed 
some of them.* 

And yet this rigorous spirit was but the mad -cap of the 
waves in a tempest; the undersurge was really freedom, and 
the truer result was coming in liberty of conscience, human 
rights, and popular independence. While apparently dangerous 

* Witchcraft had troubled the Roman Church in the Middle Ages. Tem- 
plars were burnt for it at Paris in 1309. After that time so-called witches were 
burnt by thousands in Europe. Protestants were long in getting rid of the de- 
lusion. The New Englanders were among the first to see the error. The last 
witch-burning in England was not until 1716; in Scotland, 1722. The English 
laws against witchcraft were a dead letter before they were repealed in 1736. 



RHODE ISLAND. 653 

books were burning on the town commons, men were in training 
to write better ones, and a generation qualifying to read them. 
The press was at work after 1639, an< ^ common-schools were or- 
dered to be maintained.* John Harvard founded the college which 
bears his name, in 1638, and it became a power in all the land. 
(3) Rhode Island. Roger Williams seems to have been a 
native of Wales. He was indebted to Sir Edward Coke, the 
famous lawyer, for his education at Cambridge. He took or- 
ders in the English Church, but he could not submit to the 
doctrine and polity of Archbishop Laud. As a separatist and 
reformer he came to Boston, in 1631, when he was thirty-two 
years of age; but he could not join its Church, for the mem- 
bers were ''an unseparated people," who held communion 
with their former persecutors. He announced principles which 
struck hard upon the constitution of the entire Bay Colony. He 
said that the charter of the king was invalid ; that the treaties 
with the Indians, and the payments for lands, had not clearly 
recognized them as the original possessors ; that magistrates 
ought not to enforce obedience ; that the oath of allegiance was 
unjustly required ; that the law, which compelled all healthful 
persons to attend worship, infringed upon the rights of con- 
science, and that the Church should not be supported by taxa- 
tion. He wanted a free Church and a free country. For them 
his demand was too early by nearly one hundred and fifty 
years. He accepted a call to Salem, but Endicott and Winthrop 
urged the people to forbear, lest they should promote sedition. 
Earnest for "soul-liberty," he quietly went to Plymouth, where 
his opinions were not so offensive, and for two years he there 
cultivated them. 



*The Puritans were said to have left England, in part, on account of "the 
schools of learning and religion being so corrupted ; . . . the insupportable 
charge of education;" and the bitter experience that ' most children, even the 
best, wittiest, and of the fairest hopes, are perverted, corrupted, and utterly- 
overthrown by the multitudes of evil examples and licentious behavior in these 
seminaries." Prof. M. C. Tyler (Hist. Am. Lit.) says: "It is probable that 
between the years 1630 and 1690 there were in New England as many grad- 
uates of Cambridge and Oxford as could be found in any population of similar 
size in the mother country. At one time during the first part of that period 
there was in Massachusetts and Connecticut a Cambridge graduate for every two 
hundred and fifty inhabitants, besides sons of Oxford not a few. Among the 
clergy, in particular, were some men of a scholarship accounted great even by 
the heroic standard of the seventeenth century." 



654 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

In 1635 the call to Salem was renewed, and Williams ac- 
cepted it in face of the advice given by ministers in conference 
with him, and in defiance of the general court. He accused 
them of intolerance. He seemed to be an intruder, kindling 
discord and subverting their whole government. He threw the 
army into violent dissension by representing the red cross on 
the royal banner as idolatrous. He refused the oath of alle- 
giance. A civil faction claimed him as an ally. The court 
banished him. He wandered among the Indians during four- 
teen wintery weeks, his warmest refuge being the hut of Massa- 
soit. When he was about to settle within the bounds of 
Plymouth Colony, its governor, Edward Winslow, advised him 
to choose some other field, lest there should be strife with the 
Bay Colony. In an admirable temper Williams retired to the 
spot which the chief, Canonicus, gave him "to enjoy forever." 
There he founded a settlement, and, in thankfulness to God, 
named it Providence. "I desired," said he, "it might be a 
shelter for persons distressed for conscience." There he carried 
out his theory of human government. He refused to grow 
rich. The lands were donated to settlers. The laws secured 
the rights and freedom of the republican people. The fullest 
liberty of opinion and conscience was granted to all, even to 
infidels, until the Quakers came. 

In common with all the first colonists, Williams endured 
hardships. In the strong, rough, honest style of all his writings, 
he says : ." My time was not spent altogether in spiritual labors; 
but day and night, at home and abroad, on the land and water, 
at the hoe, at the oar, for bread. . . . That great and 
pious soul, Mr. Winslow, melted, and kindly visited me, and 
put a piece of gold into the hands of my wife for our supply." 
He came to believe that immersion was the only true mode of 
baptism. But there was no minister near who had been thus 
baptized. In 1639 a layman immersed him, and then he im- 
mersed the layman. They formed a society. Thus began the 
Baptist Church, originally, in the new world. But Williams 
did not long remain a Baptist. We saw him in London as a 
seeker. On his return he was severe in his censures upon an 
ordained, or what he called "a hireling, ministry." He with- 
drew from the Church, lived in isolation, and spent some time 
in teaching the Indians. 



CONNECTICUT— NEW HAVEN. 655 

(4) The Colonies of Connecticut. In 1635 three thousand peo- 
ple from England landed at Boston. Among them was Thomas 
Hooker, a gifted and eloquent preacher, whom Laud had 
silenced for non-conformity. He and John Haynes led a com- 
pany farther west, enduring the trials of a pathless wilderness. 
They were kept alive by the cattle they drove and the game 
they caught. They bore the sick on litters, and the woods 
rang with their songs. These hundred Puritans founded Hart- 
ford and Springfield. Already some Plymouth families were 
near them. Hooker became ' ' the light of the Western 
Churches." He and his people trembled and prayed, while 
Captain Mason, with his eighty men, made defensive war upon 
the Pequod Indians. Help came from the Bay Colony and 
from Roger Williams. The spirit of the savages was broken, 
their villages burnt, many of their women and children merci- 
lessly slain, their leaders driven west to the Mohawks, and most 
of the remnant reduced to slavery. Nowhere in all the colo- 
nies had there been such an extermination of natives. Other 
tribes took warning. 

A group of exiles, worshiping God under an oak, is the 
first picture of New Haven (1638). The preacher was John 
Davenport, whom Laud had driven from his Church in London. 
With him had come many of his people, and the rich merchant, 
Theophilus Eaton, who, for twenty years, was annually elected 
governor of this colony. The people met in a barn and framed 
their constitution. The Word of God was the source of law 
in their commonwealth. Church members only could vote and 
hold office. "New Haven made the Bible its statute-book, 
and the elect its freemen." The king of England was denied 
all jurisdiction over this free and independent State. 

The colonies of Connecticut formed a union. Among the 
firmest protectors of their rights against Charles II was the 
younger John Winthrop, of Boston, who became their gover- 
nor. He had been well educated in England, and had traveled 
widely in Europe, studying the various systems of government. 
He was the correspondent of Clarendon, Milton, Isaac Newton, 
and Robert Boyle ; the student of Bacon's philosophy, and the 
possessor of a large library; the wisest statesman in all Amer- 
ica, and most praised in all the colonies. John Haynes said to 
his frequent visitor, Roger Williams, "I think that the most 



656 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

wise God hath cut out this part of the world as a refuge for 
all sorts of consciences." Bancroft affirms that a persecuting 
spirit never existed in Connecticut. Doubtless there were too 
many laws upon the minute affairs of home and society. Every 
town and village had a scholarly minister and a good school. 
' ' Religious knowledge was carried to the highest degree of 
refinement, alike in its application to moral duties and to the 
mysterious questions on the nature of God, of liberty, and of 
the human soul. ... A Church reproof was the heaviest 
calamity. . . . The best house required no fastening but a 
latch lifted by a string ; bolts and locks were unknown. . 
There was for a long time hardly a lawyer in the land. The 
husbandman who held his own plow, and fed his own cattle, 
was the great man of the age. . . . Every family was 
taught to look upward to God as to the Fountain of all good. 
Yet life was not somber. The spirit of frolic mingled with 
innocence. The annual thanksgiving was, from primitive times 
[in all New England], as joyous as it was sincere." Yale 
College owes its origin "to ten worthy fathers, who, in 1 700, 
assembled at Bradford, and each one, laying a few volumes on 
a table, said, ' I give these books for the founding of a college 
in this colony. ' ' The Church was congregational in polity, 
and established by law. The Confessions of Westminster 
(slightly modified ) and of Savoy, with the Saybrook Platform, 
were adopted. The system was that of Consociation, midway 
between Presbytery and strict Independency, with a judicial 
power of discipline. 

These are samples of the many settlements, most of which 
formed a union in 1643, as "the United Colonies of New Eng- 
land," in order "to advance the Christian religion, and reduce 
and convert the savages to civil society." Here was the germ 
of the later confederation of the United States. From the first 
there had been various efforts to teach and Christianize the 
Indians, and the most eminent missionary was John Eliot, the 
pastor at Roxbury, in the Bay Colony. He went among the 
wild savages, won their hearts, wisely managed the opposition 
of their priests and chiefs, taught the men to cultivate the soil 
and build houses, and the women to spin and weave, learned 
to speak their language, translated parts of the Bible for them, 
and trained many of them to read it. His version is now a 



PENNSYLVANIA. 657 

sealed book, a literary curiosity ; for only one man living can 
read this memorial of a perished tribe and its saintly teacher. 
In 1696 there were thirty Indian Churches in New England. 

The union brought a more liberal spirit into the Bay Col- 
ony. The severities upon dissenters and so-called witches, the 
cropping of men's ears, the scarlet letter, and the pillory, 
caused a wholesome reaction. The theory of witchcraft was 
doomed about 1693, when Parson Hale found his good wife 
accused of it, and thus had his eyes opened to the delusion ; 
when Robert Calef, a weaver, exposed the absurdity and the 
unfair mode of conducting the trials, in a book which was pub- 
licly burnt on the square of Harvard College by order of Pres- 
ident Increase Mather; when fifty persons, who were lying in 
jail expecting to be sent to the flames, awakened general sym- 
pathy; and when a jury was brave enough to examine the 
evidence, discover the want of facts, and bring in the verdict, 
"Not guilty." Salem drove the great prosecutor of witches 
from the town. Many active accusers deeply repented, and 
publicly asked the pardon of their fellow -citizens. Cotton 
Mather has been defended from the charge of zeal in the delu- 
sion which was suddenly ended forever. Thirty years later he 
certainly had the fearless energy to advocate vaccination as a 
remedy for a disease which often raged in the colonies, and 
destroyed more Indians than the sword. He stood firm while 
mobs paraded the streets of Boston, took part in the war of 
pamphlets, opposed the decision of the general court, insisted 
upon experiments, won nearly all the clergy to his side, and 
went to his rest before science and common sense had their full 
triumph for the good of humanity. But he lived to see toler- 
ation granted to all Protestants, and the freedom of the colony 
no longer limited to the members of the Christian Church. 

5. Pennsylvania and New Jersey. These provinces owed most 

of their early liberties to William Penn, the son of an English 

admiral. He was born in London, 1644, and reared in the 

Anglican Church. At Oxford he was a vigorous boatman and 

student, until he was found to be drifting into Quakerism. To 

cure this tendency he was sent to travel on the Continent, 

where he was charmed with the Huguenots, and went deeper 

into philosophy and theology at Saumur. His father heard 

him avow Quakerism, and plead conscience for it; he disin- 

42 



658 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

herited his unflinching son, of whom he had cherished ambi- 
tious hopes. The pressing wants of the exile were secretly 
relieved by his mother's love. He was soon in prison for his 
religion. When told by a bishop that he should be kept there 
for life, if he did not recant, he replied, ' ' Then a prison shall 
be my grave." The learned Stillingfleet was sent to reason 
with him; he listened unconvinced, and said, "The Tower is 
the worst argument in the world ; those who use force in relig- 
ion never can be in the right." In 1663 his relenting father 
obtained his freedom. Again he was arrested ; the jury ac- 
quitted him, but the judge ordered them back to their room, 
saying, "We will have a verdict, or ye shall starve for it." 
They did starve through forty-eight hours, and still said, "Not 
guilty." Fines were laid on them, and on Penn, who Avas 
ordered to jail. He calmly said to the angry judge, "Thy re- 
ligion persecutes; mine forgives." His father paid the fine, and 
William was again at the Quaker meetings. When the brave 
admiral was dying he said, "Son William, if you and your 
Friends keep to your plain way of preaching and living, you 
will make an end to the priests." 

Young Penn looked to the New World as a refuge and 
home for himself and the Friends. But even there his brethren 
had few liberties in the colonies. His father had left him a 
claim of sixteen thousand pounds against the government, and 
Charles II was glad to pay it in land, which he granted in 1680 
and named Pennsylvania. Duke James sold him Delaware. 
Penn was one of the share-holders in East New Jersey. No 
other Protestant colonist had such large proprietary rights. He 
said of his province: "God will bless it and make it the seed 
of a nation." He wrote to the pioneers already dwelling in it: 
"You shall be governed by laws of your own making and live 
a free, and, if you will, a sober and industrious people. I shall 
not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person." During 
his rule of thirty-seven years he kept his pledges. 

In 1682 Penn sailed up the Delaware river with one hundred 
immigrants, and was welcomed by the Swedes, Dutch, and 
English. Under an elm his famous treaty was made with the 
Indians, and there grew up Philadelphia, which in three years 
had six hundred houses. His colony soon numbered ten thou- 
sand people. Pennsylvania had her legislature to represent 



SOUTH CAROLINA. 659 

them and care for their rights. The majority were Quakers. 
Peace-makers were appointed in each county to prevent law- 
suits. Laws were made to check vice and promote virtue. 
Labor was forbidden on the Sabbath. Philadelphia had her 
press, high-school, and churches. No form of religion was 
established by law; there was no union of Church and state; 
liberty of conscience was assured to all men. But when George 
Keith urged that it was inconsistent for Quakers to hold any 
civil office, and engage in public affairs, thus rending his own 
sect into parties and disturbing the peace, he was indicted by 
a grand jury and fined as a violator of the laws. „ Germans of 
the Reformed and Lutheran Churches, Moravians and Mennon- 
ites, settled as good neighbors among Scotch and Irish Presby- 
terians. The Quakers were the majority in West (South) 
Jersey. At Newark the Puritans were strong. David and John 
Brainerd labored among the Indians with marked devotedness 
and success. 

6. The Carolinas. For South Carolina John Locke and 
Shaftesbury devised "the grand model" of a constitution in 
1669, but the philosophers of England were unwise statesmen 
for a country which they never visited. They planned an aris- 
tocracy. Only men of noble blood should rule; the cabins in 
the woods were to be the castles of squires and barons. The 
English Church alone was to be considered orthodox, while 
toleration was offered to "Jews, heathens, and other dissent- 
ers,"" and to "men of any religion." Twenty-five years proved 
the failure of this scheme. The Quakers, supported by the 
Huguenots and Presbyterians, saved the colony from the high- 
handed measures of "the cavaliers and ill-livers." Among these 
Presbyterians were some of the three thousand exiles who were 
transported from Scotland as slaves by the agents of Charles II, 
and others (as in Pennsylvania) who were sold into a limited 
servitude to pay their passage. The Huguenots came poor 
from the persecutions of Louis XIV. Such people had not fled 
from oppressive kings to obey proud cavaliers. 

The royalists described North Carolina as the "sanctuary 
of runaways, a land where there was scarcely any govern- 
ment," with a scattered population of "Presbyterians, Inde- 
pendents, Quakers, and other evil-disposed persons." They 
might have added the Lutherans. Many of them had fled from 



660 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

the intolerance of Virginia. English rulers ordered the Church 
of England to be established, though there "was but one 
clergyman in the whole country." No church was reared until 
1705; there was no printing-press until 1754; the people had 
little care for colleges, lawyers, and well-defined laws. They 
were the freest of the free, intent upon governing themselves in 
the simplest way, and how well they did it may be seen in the 
Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence — attributed to May, 
1775, — in which the "Scotch-Irish" spoke as if they remem- 
bered the covenants of their fathers. 

7. Georgia. This colony originated in peculiar motives. It 
was founded in 1732, when religious persecution had ceased in 
Great Britain. It was an asylum, not alone for the oppressed 
in conscience, but for the victims of unjust laws, whose extreme 
rigor fell upon debtors and criminals in the English jails. It 
testifies to the benevolence of General Oglethorpe, "a Christian 
gentleman of the cavalier school," the poor man's friend, and 
a reformer of prison discipline. Many English debtors, many 
poor of every class and of various climes, Salzburgers driven 
from the Tyrol, Moravians, Highland Scots, found homes in 
Georgia, in which Oglethorpe spent ten years of toil and denial. 
Liberty was granted to those of every religion except papists. 
The Wesleys and Whitefield came, preached to multitudes, and 
sent their hymns echoing through the forests. 

Thus, by an exode from Europe, continuing through a 
hundred and seventy years, the thirteen colonies had become 

"The calm retreat 
Of undeserved distress, the better home 
Of those whom bigots chase from foreign lands ; 
Not built on rapine, servitude, and woe, 
But bound by social freedom." 

II. The United States. 

The world knows that the colonies were united in an inde- 
pendent nation by means of a revolution. The causes of the 
revolt and the long war (1775-83) were not directly religious, 
nor altogether political. Beneath the resistance to taxation and 
to England's demand for submission without representation, 
there were an ethical spirit, a conviction of human rights, and 
a desire for civil liberty. These were moral effects of Protest- 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 66 1 

antism. There were strong forces of Christianity in the great 
defense. The Presbyterian Synod of New York was the first 
ecclesiastical body to advise an open resistance to England.. 
Dr. John Witherspoon, whom Scotland gave to Princeton Col- 
lege* as its sixth president, was a member of Congress in 1776, 
and most eager for the Declaration of Independence to be 
signed, pledging all his reputation and property on the issue of 
the contest. The Baptists and Congregationalists were not less 
zealous. Many an Episcopalian joined with his fellow-church- 
man, George Washington, in the struggle for liberty. John 
Adams represented the Unitarians. The Quakers are justly 
proud of Benjamin Franklin, the American embassador at Paris, 
who effected the treaty of alliance with France in 1778, and 
thus virtually secured the independence of the colonies. There, 
too, he was one of the signers of the treaty of peace in 1783, 
by which they were acknowledged as "The United States of 
America." The union which he had proposed, twenty-eight 
years before, was now a fact. In the convention of 1787, 
which met to frame a constitution, he moved, but not success- 
fully, that a chaplain be chosen and the sessions opened by 
prayer, f The patriot, now in his eightieth year, said : ' ' I have 
lived a long time; and the longer I live the more convincing 
proofs I see of this truth, that God governs the affairs of men. 
And if a sparrow can not fall to the ground without his notice, 
is it possible that an empire can rise without his aid?" Mighty 
words from him who had ventured to grasp the lightning! 

But what were the pen and diplomacy of Franklin without 
the sword and generalship of Washington? And he who had 
prayed for victory rendered praise to the Almighty who gave 
it. History ought ever to repeat the tribute rendered him, as 
"first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his 



* Princeton is described as a place which Dickinson, Edwards, Davies, and 
Witherspoon made the fountain of the educated republicanism and Presbyterian- 
ism which was the most powerful influence of the century in the Middle and 
Southern States. Some of her alumni were pastors of those troops which fired 
the first shots of the Revolution, in 1771, on the Alamance in North Carolina, 
before the battle of Lexington in New England; others are claimed as the 
authors of the Mecklenburg Declaration ; and others were chaplains and officers 
in the Revolutionary army. 

|The first Congress had begun with prayer by Rev. James Duche, an Epis- 
copalian, and had elected him chaplain. 



662 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

countrymen." They twice elected him their president. He 
filled the office eight years (1789-97) with such ability that his 
administration has ever been regarded as the model for his suc- 
cessors. In 1799, at the age of sixty-seven, he passed from 
earth, and all civilized realms honor him as "the father of his 
country." 

We have seen that there was a union of Church and state 
in certain colonies.* The Constitution of 1787 did not dissolve 
it; an amendment declared that "Congress shall make no laws 
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free 
exercise thereof." The whole subject was left to the States 
themselves. Already had the people of Virginia offered a solu- 
tion of the difficult problem, for, in 1776, the Presbytery of 
Hanover petitioned the legislature to abolish the union between 
the Church and the civil power. The Baptists and Quakers 
made the same request. They wished nothing from the public 
treasury for their own Churches; they were unwilling to pay 
taxes to support a Church of which they were not adherents. 
The Episcopalians and Methodists offered remonstrances, plead- 
ing that theirs was a vested right. The contest grew warm. 
Thomas Jefferson was earnest for the dissolution. Patrick 
Henry favored the support of episcopacy. But in 1784 every 
law which interfered with the religious rights of any citizen 
was swept away. The same result was attained in other States, 
Connecticut and Massachusetts (1833) being the last to place 
all Churches upon an equality before the law. So broad is 
religious liberty in the United States that even Mormons have 
their temple, the Chinese their joss-houses, and Spiritualists 
their seances. The tares grow with the wheat, and the reaping 
is left to the supreme Lord of all consciences. 

Thus the States yielded up their control of the Church, but 
they were still regarded as Christian in their spirit and civiliza- 
tion. In its general principles Christianity was a part of the 
common law of the land. By religion our fathers meant Prot- 
estant Christianity, and their Bible was King James's version. 



*The Churches established by law were: I. The Anglican Episcopal in 
Virginia, and, partially, in all other southern colonies, New York and New 
Jersey. 2. The Congregational in New England, except Rhode Island. Only 
in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Delaware, had the Protestants an equality 
of religious rights. 



ROMAN CATHOLICS. 663 

These were meant to be perpetually recognized, as the right of 
the people, by all who administered the laws. The Bible was 
to be associated with the oath taken by every civil officer and 
witness. It was to hold its unsectarian place in the schools. 
The chaplains of Congress and of the Assemblies of State legis- 
lation were to be Christians. The nation, to which this religion 
and this Bible had given existence and freedom, was understood 
to be a Christian nation, and was intended so to remain, with 
the Lord's Day to be kept sacred, the churches free, the 
schools unsectarian, the courts mindful of God, the people in 
rightful possession of the best means of morality, prosperity, 
and bliss. 

No Protestant Church asked any sectarian favors of Con- 
gress. But in 1788 the Pope of Rome made overtures for 
the appointment of a vicar apostolic, or bishop, in the United 
States. Congress declined on the ground that the subject was 
ecclesiastical, and therefore beyond its jurisdiction. The pope 
made John Carroll, of Maryland, his vicar, who soon became 
the first archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church in the 
United States — a Church which then had less than fifty priests 
in the thirteen States, while the Protestants had about fifteen 
hundred ministers, and more churches. In the national terri- 
tory ■' north-west of the River Ohio," which had been part of 
New France, early Jesuit explorers and missionaries had dis- 
played great heroism, nominally converted many Indians, and 
founded towns of French settlers and half-breeds. There the 
Roman Catholics were probably the majority in numbers. But 
this territory was covered by the ordinance of 1787, which pro- 
vided, and still provides, that "religion, morality, and knowl- 
edge being necessary to good government and the happiness 
of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever 
be encouraged." This was part of a compact which should 
"forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent." 
The intended religion was Christianity, unsectarian, and yet 
Protestant, and its source was the unsectarian Bible, in ' ' King 
James's version," which then held an undisputed place in the 
homes, the schools, the courts, the legislatures, and the denom- 
inational Churches of the real fathers and founders of this nation. 

Benjamin Rush, an eminent physician in the city where he 
signed the Declaration of Independence, advocated a system 



664 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of free schools extending to every township, or district of more 
than a hundred families ; academies and colleges at suitable 
points ; a university for the State, where ' ' law, physic, divinity, 
the law of nature and nations, (political) economy," should be 
taught by books, lectures, and otherwise ; and finally, to crown, 
unify, and complete the whole grand system, that there should 
be a national university, sustained by the general government, 
in "the federal city." He expressed the thought of the wisest 
men, and of the majority of the people, when he said that 
' ' the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to 
be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and 
without virtue there can be no liberty ; and liberty is the object 
and life of all republican government." A philosophy and an 
indifference, unknown to the majority of the nation's founders, 
have recently led to very different opinions. Even the imported 
infidelity of the French Revolutionists did not shatter the pop- 
ular confidence in Christianity and Christian education. The 
rash prophecy that the Bible would soon disappear from Amer- 
ican civilization has been nullified by the American Bible 
Society (1816), which now helps to publish the Divine Word in 
two hundred and twenty -five languages, and by numberless 
issues of it from private and denominational presses. 

New territory has been acquired and settled. New States 
are still forming in the Great West. The people of the colo- 
nies in 1775 numbered only c, 800,000; in twenty-five years that 
number was nearly doubled; it was quadrupled in 1825; in 
1850 the census was about 23,200,000; and the estimate for 
1878 approaches 46,000,000. No nation in Europe, except 
Russia, has a larger population.* The work of founding 
Churches and educational institutions, and providing for their 
support, has been vast, and it still requires effort. 

*The population of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1874, was 32,124,598; 
that of France, in 1872, was 36,102,921 ; that of the German Empire, in 1871, 
was 41,060,846; that of the Kingdom of Italy, in 1871, was 26,801,154. 



THE EPISCOPAL CHURCHES. 665 



Chapter XXV. 

CHURCHES IN NORTH AMERICA. 

1606-1878. 

We must limit our view chiefly to the United States and 
Canada. Most of their Churches were the children of the Old 
World. They brought over with them their creeds, polities, 
and individualism. Europe had trained them in their differ- 
ences. In most of them an inherited tendency to cleavage was 
freely developed. Questions of doctrine, polity, and reform pro- 
duced sects. Yet America's fifty religious denominations do not 
equal the number in Great Britain or Germany. In them all 
there are but four central principles of government — Congrega- 
tionalism, presbytery, episcopacy, and papacy. The prominent 
theologies of the evangelical denominations are Calvinism and 
Arminianism ; elements of the two systems are combined in 
some creeds, whether formulated or unwritten. We first notice 
the leading Churches in the United States. 

I. The Episcopal Churches. 

I. The Protestant Episcopal Church was the first planted 
(1606), and the most widely established by law, in the colonies ; 
yet no other was more disorganized by the Revolution. It was 
still Anglican when its filial connection with the -Diocese of 
London was broken, and the Propagation Society refused aid. 
It was disestablished. It had no bishop in 1783, and only 
twelve of the one hundred clergymen in Virginia favored an 
appointment. The Church in Connecticut sent Dr. Samuel 
Seabury to England to receive consecration to that office ; but 
he found that he must first sacrifice loyalty to his own country, 
swear allegiance to the king, and recognize him as head of the 
Church. These he was unwilling to do. In 1784 he was or- 
dained by the non-juring bishops in Scotland, but this did not 
satisfy the American Episcopalians. The delegates from seven 



666 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

States (not New England) met the next year in the first Gen- 
eral Convention, at Philadelphia, and formed a constitution for 
their Church. It was proposed to omit from the Book of 
Common Prayer the Nicene and Athanasian creeds, the phrase 
concerning Christ's descent into hell, absolution, and baptismal 
regeneration, and make the future bishops more amenable to 
the lower clergy ; the book was so published with the approval 
of Dr. William White, the chaplain to Congress, and Dr. Sam- 
uel Provoost. But the bishops of England objected to these 
changes, and they were not pressed.* By a special act of 
Parliament, in 1787, the English archbishops were enabled to 
ordain Dr. White Bishop of Pennsylvania and Dr. Provoost 
Bishop of New York, they having gone to England for that 
purpose ; still later Dr. James Madison was, in the same way, 
made the Bishop of Virginia. Seabury was now recognized as 
a bishop, and American episcopacy was officially perfected. 
This Church has had no archbishop in the United States. Its 
highest ecclesiastical power is in the triennial convention, with 
its house of bishops and house of lay delegates. Every dio- 
cese has its annual convention. 

Bishop White (1 748-1 836) is described as a man of majestic 
bearing, amiability, geniality, great moderation, good sense, 
and honor among all Christian denominations, with a happy 
influence upon public opinion. One of his successors wrote 
that "he was, to the last, strongly opposed to the theory com- 
prised in the words Priest, Altar, Sacrifice ; this being one of 
the very few points on which he was highly sensitive." He 
was a Low-churchman, very tolerant of differences in opinion ; 
but not "a passionate follower of Augustine in theology, or 
of Wesley or Whitefield in their views of experimental piety." 
He was fearless amid the horrors of pestilence. When the 
yellow fever raged he sent his family to the healthful country, 
and was at all hours by the couch of the sick or at the graves 
of the dead. When verging upon his eighty-fifth year he daily 
took his rounds among the victims of the cholera in Philadel- 
phia, his native city and his life-long home. He was earnest 
for the amelioration of prison discipline, the reform of aban- 

* In the revision of 1787 the Athanasian Creed and the Absolution of the 
Sick were omitted, and other changes were made adapting it to the national 
republic. 



HIGH AND LOW CHURCH. 66j 

doned women, the education of the deaf and dumb and the 
blind, the care of orphans and the aged poor, and the whole 
work of missions. Another of his successors, Alonzo Potter, 
wrote: "When seeing Bishop White with Bishop Hobart, I 
have often thought of Melancthon and Luther; the one made 
for counsel, the other for action ; the one meek, erudite, far- 
seeing, philosophical ; the other impulsive, bold, prompt, with 
a sway over men rarely surpassed." On several points they 
differed materially. 

Bishop Hobart (of New York, 1 798-1 830) was noted for his 
energy, decision, and his rapidity in walking, conversing, or 
reading the service. He loved Princeton as his a/ma mater, 
but thought that his extemporaneous prayers with his fellow- 
students had not been quite proper and churchly devotions. 
He was bound to the ritual. "He was one of the High- 
churchmen of his day," wrote Governor King, "and admitted 
no compromise of his opinion^ as an Episcopalian ; but he was 
still in the most agreeable relations with many clergymen of 
other communions. As a preacher he was natural, earnest, 
bold, effective. . . . With the great mass of the clergy it 
is not too much to say that his will was law." He was active 
in establishing the theological seminary of his Church at New 
York. He greatly admired the writings « of Richard Baxter, 
and seems to have agreed with him in theology. During a 
visit to Europe (1823) he convinced foreigners that his Amer- 
ican Church did not insist on mere external rites, but was 
faithful to the essential truths of the Gospel. "In Rome he 
preached three times in a chapel in which Protestant worship 
was then barely tolerated, and there made an impressive and 
effective appeal in behalf of the persecuted Waldenses. " Again 
in England he found that there was a canonical barrier to his 
preaching in an Anglican pulpit, and he said, "Isn't it extraor- 
dinary that I can preach in Rome, and yet not be allowed to 
preach in London?" Parliament removed the obstacle. Thus 
the fellowship of the Episcopal Churches of England and 
America was promoted. 

The distinctions of High Church and Low Church did not 
spring entirely from theology, for the former party did not claim 
all the men of truly evangelical doctrine ; their root is the 
theory of apostolic succession, the assertion of an exclusively 



668 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

divine right for episcopacy, and a most literal adherence to the 
forms and words of the ritual. Low-churchmen obey the 
canons which forbid their official recognition of ministers in 
other denominations, as rightfully ordained, but their co-opera- 
tion with other Christians in beneficent enterprises has proved 
a mutual benefit. Charles M'llvaine, Bishop of Ohio (1832-73), 
is most widely known by his " Evidences of Christianity," a 
book which does good service against rationalism throughout 
Christendom and may be read by the Japanese in their own 
language. He was one of the champions against the Oxford 
Tractarianism, which helped more than thirty American clergy- 
men into the Roman Church. He wrote, "No Priest, no 
Altar, no Sacrifice, but Christ," to check the tendencies to rit- 
ualism. This Church has extended its organizations ■ through 
the whole land. It has the requisite elements and agencies for 
prosperous growth.* 

2. The Reformed Episcopal Church, a branch of the 
one just described, "came into existence amidst the blessed 
influences which made the Evangelical Alliance of 1873 an 
ever memorable period in the history of Evangelical Chris- 
tianity. The causes which gave rise to it were far beyond that 
event ; they had been at work for more than a generation, 
operating quietly and below the surface, like the great process 
of nature." After the Alliance closed its meetings in New 
York, the members of various denominations united in the 
celebration of the Lord's Supper, and Bishop Cummins, of 
Kentucky, took an active part in it, with Dr. William Arnot, 
one of the heroic founders of the Free Church of Scotland. 
For this the bishop was held amenable to a violated canon. 
He withdrew from the Protestant Episcopal body, and began 
to organize the Reformed Episcopal Church. He ordained as 
a missionary bishop Dr. C. E. Cheney, a rector in Chicago, 
who had become virtually independent of diocesan authority. 
They did not regard their formal deposition as valid. In the 
third General Council, 1875, there were represented about 
fifty Churches in the United States and Canada, with sixty 
ministers. Soon afterwards a third bishop was consecrated. 
This energetic body differs from that which it left, mainly, in 
the following principles : Episcopacy is not diocesan, nor held 

* For statistics of Churches see Notes II, III, IV, V, VI. 



CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH. 669 

to be of divine right ; the Christian Church exists in more than 
one order and form of polity ; the rejection of theories which 
favor apostolic succession, sacramental grace, "the real pres- 
ence," baptismal regeneration, and undue respect to saints, 
seasons, places, and ceremonies ; liberty as to robes and human 
rites ; and an official recognition of Christian ministers in all 
truly evangelical denominations. The Thirty-five Articles of 
religion, put forth by this body, evince a genuine and vigorous 
Protestantism. It has branches in .England and Canada. 

3. A Protestant Episcopal Church in Mexico has been 
organizing (1869-78), with three bishops and over sixty congre- 
gations in a General Synod. Its ministers are chiefly con- 
verted priests of the Roman Church. The new body aims to 
effect a reformation, not a revolution. It and the missions of 
American Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, are powerful 
agencies for evangelizing Mexico. 

4. Bands of Moravians or United Brethren made homes in 
the American colonies as*early as 1732, under the direction 
of their patron and bishop, Count Zinzendorf, whose discretion 
hardly equaled his warm piety. They number about fourteen 
thousand members, living in communities of a patriarchal sort, 
such as Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Litiz, in Pennsylvania. They 
are widely scattered through the States. Their doctrines agree, 
mainly, with those of the Augsburg Confession. In missions 
and education they have been peculiarly efficient.* 

II. The Congregational Church. 

The successful organization of this body began in America 
rather than in England. The Plymouth Pilgrims were the 
true fathers of Independency, and the Bay colonists of Congre- 
gationalism. The two systems were allied from the first, and 
afterwards united. The office of elder was gradually dropped, 
and that of deacon was elevated. In Connecticut, for a long 
time, the Consociation had a sort of presbyterial authority over 
its Churches. 

The Church in Massachusetts came to be seriously injured 
by the law which granted a civil .vote to none but members 

*"The United Brethren in Christ" is the title of a different body, similar 
to the Methodists, and organized about 1800 by Otterbein and other German 
ministers. 



67O HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of its legalized denomination; they alone had the rights of 
freemen. In 1657 the legislature called a synod at Boston to 
devise a remedy. The result was the "Half-way Covenant," a 
sort of compromise between the state and the Church, by 
which all baptized persons, admitting the truth of Christianity, 
were to be regarded as members of the Church, without being 
required to give evidence of personal piety. The remedy was 
worse than the evil. Its ablest defender was John Stoddard, a 
decided Calvinist, the pastor at Northampton, who held that 
the Lord's Supper was a converting ordinance. It brought 
hundreds of unconverted members into the Church, kindled a 
violent and long controversy, and led to a sad decline in piety 
and doctrine. The man who did most to promote revival 
and reform has been called "the greatest metaphysician that 
America has produced" — one who, Robert Hall said, "ranks 
with the brightest luminaries of the Christian Church, not ex- 
cluding any country or any age ;" one of whom Bancroft says, 
"he that will know the workings ofr the mind of New England 
in the middle of the last century, and the throbbings of its 
heart, must give his days and nights to the study of Jonathan 
Edwards. ' ' 

Born 1703, at East Windsor, Connecticut, where his father 
was pastor ; evincing genius and vigorous reasoning powers 
when a child ; at the age of twelve writing seriously of " a 
very remarkable outpouring of the Spirit of God" in his 
native town; a graduate of Yale College, in 1720, with his 
mind then at work upon his doctrine of the human will, young 
Edwards had such an experience in his spiritual conversion that 
God's excellence, wisdom, holiness, and love appeared to him 
"in the sun, moon, and stars, in the clouds and blue sky, 
in the grass, flowers, and trees, in the water and in all nature." 
The whole universe seemed changed to him, its Maker all- 
glorious in sovereignty, and his Redeemer unspeakably gra- 
cious. He studied theology two years at New Haven, and 
preached a few months to a Presbyterian Church in New York. 
He taught in Yale College and married. In the seventh year 
of his pastorate at Northampton his pungent, searching, and 
often terrific preaching roused the people. They felt the pres- 
ence and power of God. The great revival (1734-5) arrested 
the attention of men in the colonies and in Europe. It ex- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 67 1 

tended through New England. Whitefield gave to it his spir- 
itual fervor and eloquence. But it was marred by certain 
extravagances which Edwards opposed with voice and pen, and 
he presented a remedy in his work on the " Religious Affec- 
tions." He repudiated the Half-way Covenant, which his 
predecessor, John Stoddard, had introduced into his church. 
Like John Calvin at Geneva, he stood firm against the admis- 
sion of unrenewed persons to its communion. He did not 
require such a minute examination into the religious experience 
of a candidate as the Puritans had introduced ; the fact, not 
the manner, of regeneration was the proper inquiry ; "a pro- 
fession of the things wrought" by the Holy Spirit, and of 
faith in Christ, was all that the apostles required. He preached 
and printed the views which he had drawn from the Bible, 
tracing the line between the Church and the world. Excite- 
ment ran high, and, like Calvin, he was forced to retire before 
the storm. He lived for some months in the town, and occa- 
sionally preached to the people who had seen their opposition 
indorsed in a council by a majority of one, but at length, in a 
parish meeting, they voted that he should not again enter their 
pulpit. Still he had there a few warm friends who generously 
helped to support him and his large family. Admirers in Scot- 
land sent him a liberal donation. Two calls brought hope ; 
one to the small church at Stockbridge ; the other to be a mis- 
sionary to a tribe of Indians near that place, the London So- 
ciety supporting him. He accepted both, and in 175 1 began 
the labors which enlisted much of his vigor for six years. 
Then and there he wrote his works on " Original Sin" and the 
"Freedom of the Will," and these "must secure the trans- 
mission of his name as a prodigy of intellect to the end of the 
world." In 1758 he succeeded the Rev. Aaron Burr, his 
son-in-law, as president of Princeton College, and died the 
same year. 

"In the great [intellectual] movements of the Christian 
world during the past century and a half, we trace the influence 
of no one uninspired man so constantly and deeply affecting 
them as that of Edwards." It is seen upon such influential 
men as Thomas Chalmers and Robert Hall. His Life of David 
Brainerd, the missionary among the Indians of New Jersey, 
stimulated Henry Martyn, by whom God did wonders in India, 



672 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

and W. C. Burns, a shining light in China. This power was 
felt by Andrew Fuller, one of the revivers of the Baptist Church 
in England, and his biographer states that the dissemination of 
Edwards's appeal for "Union in Extraordinary Prayer for the 
Revival of Religion," in 1734, was a great means in kindling 
the flame of zeal which created the Baptist Missionary Society 
in 1792, and inspired Carey, . Marshman and others to labor 
under it. 

He was a prophet honored, outside of Northampton, in his 
own country. In no other colonies was there such keen doc- 
trinal discussion as in New England, and he gave a new turn to 
investigation and controversy. His assault on the Half-way 
Covenant virtually broke the union between Church and state. 
His strokes upon the prevailing Arminianism were long felt. 
"On the basis of his system Belamy delineated True Religion; 
Smalley enforced the distinction between Natural and Moral Abil- 
ity; and Hopkins reduced disinterested love to a System of The- 
ology in which the divine sovereignty was all in all." He started 
controversies which entered the Presbyterian Church, forming 
schools of theology, and affecting it in its second disunion. 

Edwards did not spare the Pelagianism, and miscalled "lib- 
eralism," which the compromise between Church and state had 
nourished. Whitefield and other revivalists asserted that Socin- 
ianism was then in the land, and Arianism not far off. This was 
repelled as a slander, but Unitarians have since claimed that their 
doctrines had an early, though quite concealed, existence in New 
England. In 1750 they were discussed at Harvard College and 
Boston, in social circles, and impressed upon a well-educated 
farmer's spn, John Adams, who ceased to think of entering the 
Gospel ministry, expressed his aversion to Calvinism, became a 
lawyer, caught the patriotic spirit of James Otis, boldly denoun- 
ced the English Stamp Act, and in the Continental Congress of 
1774 said, "The die is now cast; I have passed the Rubicon." 
He would survive or perish with his country ; he did survive to 
be its second president, and see his eldest son elected as the sixth. 
His influence upon Unitarianism was powerful. In his eightieth 
year (18 15) he thus replied to a statement that the doctrine was 
but thirty years old in New England: "I can testify to its old 
age." He mentioned Dr. Mayhew and other ministers who 
cherished it in 1750, and he wrote: "Among the laity how 



UNITARIANS. 673 

many could I name — lawyers, physicians, tradesmen, farmers." 
In 1756 the Arian book -of Thomas Emlyn was imported from 
Ireland and republished. Twelve years later Dr. Samuel Hop- 
kins preached and printed, at Boston, a sermon on the Divinity 
of Christ, saying that it was needed there. He was imitated in 
other pulpits. 

The Episcopal Church in "King's Chapel," Boston, having 
no rector, engaged James Freeman as reader, in 1782, and in 
his third year of service he openly avowed his ' ' Liberal Chris- 
tianity, " as it was long called, and so revised the liturgy as to 
erase the doctrine of the Trinity. He was the first man, in the 
United States, to announce the system from the pulpit. When 
the three American bishops refused to ordain him, the wardens 
of King's Chapel ordained him. He pressed his doctrines for 
fifty years. The liturgy was so used in that chapel, and still is 
so read, as to afford the Unitarians a formally legal right to the 
property. The system was not elsewhere openly preached in 
Nmv England until the beginning of the present century. No 
Congregational pastor had yet avowed it. But it was advanced 
by imported books and various periodicals. Suspicions rose and 
fell upon ministers who resisted a close search into the theology 
of candidates, and even upon Henry Ware, whose election to 
the Chair of Divinity in Harvard College, was unsuccessfully 
opposed by Dr. Jedediah Morse. The Panoplist (a magazine 
which passed into the Missionary Herald) was started by Dr. 
Morse as the organ of orthodoxy, in 1805, but its warnings 
were denounced as calumny. Seven years later a few copies of 
Belsham's "Life of Lindsay" came over from London, and 
produced an explosion; for Dr. Morse obtained a copy, after 
months of effort, and drew from it the letters of several minis- 
ters in Boston, and their account of esoteric Unitarianism * in 
America, and of the means used to promote its growth. These 
he printed to the astonishment of the country. Thenceforth the 
system had its declared and zealous advocates. Dividing lines 
were soon drawn between ministers. The Congregational pas- 
tors, who avowed Unitarianism and had the sympathy of their 
people, generally carried with them the churches to which they 

*The Universalists were more pronounced. In 1803 Hosea Ballon wrote and 
published the first Unitarian hook by an American author. It was on the Atone- 
ment. In 1810 Thomas and Noah Worcester published their modified Arianism. 

43 



674 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

ministered, and with them went the property. They claimed 
the legal rights of Congregationalists in regard to funds, endow- 
ments, and professorships ; thus Harvard College and Divinity 
School passed to the Liberal Christians. In 1825 the American 
Unitarian Association was formed, representing about one hun- 
dred and twenty Churches in New England. Thereafter Unita- 
rianism has a separate history. 

The orthodox Congregationalists had not been wanting 
in zeal and enterprise, during the warm controversy. They 
defended, preached, and published their theology. The Hop- 
kinsians and stricter Calvinists founded the Andover Theological 
Seminary, in 1808, and Dr. E. D. Griffin came from the reviv- 
als in his Presbyterian pastorate at Newark, New Jersey, and 
filled one of its chairs for six years. He then made the Park 
Street Church, Boston, a fortress of Calvinism, and sent out 
relief in the form of his renowned Lectures, until 18 15, when 
he accepted the presidency of Williams College, which had 
existed twenty-two years. After him Dr. Lyman Beecher 
preached mightily in Boston, and greatly checked the process 
of defection from the orthodox Church. He was one of the 
first apostles of Temperance in America. Andover was a 
source of vast power when Professor Moses Stuart defended the 
doctrine of the Trinity, and gave a fresh impetus to Biblical 
studies ; when Dr. Leonard Woods clearly expounded theology 
on the basis laid down by Edwards ; when the devotedness of 
S. J. Mills to the missionary work sent many of her sons to 
foreign lands with the Gospel, and when many more of them 
took their way into the Northern States, and the great West, to 
plant Churches, found colleges and theological schools, advance 
the public good, increase the might of the press, urge the reform 
of society, and the removal of national evils, and serve their coun- 
try with patriotism, and their Divine Master with earnestness. 

Among other names of a host is that of Timothy Dwight, 
who excelled in checking infidelity among the students of Yale 
College, of which he was president (1795-1817), while he barred 
the progress of "Liberal Christianity" by his sermons and his 
lectures from the chair of theology. A revival blessed the 
college, and there have since been eighteen such pentecosts.* 

* Several of these were almost contemporaneous with great revivals 
Princeton, and other colleges. 



in 



COUNCIL OF 1865. 675 

One of his successors in the chair of Divinity was the eloquent 
Dr. N. W. Taylor, who modified the principles of Edwards 
and reared a system of theology on his theory of moral gov- 
ernment. He held that a free agent must have ability to 
fulfill his moral obligations ; that happiness is the chief good ; 
that the desire for it, or self-love, is the decisive motive in vol- 
untary actions ; that sin consists in seeking happiness in created 
sources, and holiness consists in finding it in God ; that regen- 
eration is the determination to obtain this holiness, and it is 
secured by the truth and the spirit of God, who works in the 
soul in accordance with the laws of the mind. This theology 
had an influence far beyond New England. 

A General Council came to be required by the progress of 
the denomination. Hence the Convention of 1852, at Albany. 
It brought into closer unity the churches of the East and the 
West, and took liberal measures for church extension, education, 
and missions, especially in the West and South. The second 
National Council was held, in 1865, in the famous old South 
Church of Boston. The call admitted ' ' two delegates for every 
ten churches, and an equal number of pastors and laymen." 
More than five hundred delegates appeared, representing more 
than three thousand churches in the land from Maine to Mex- 
ico, and six theological seminaries. Measures were adopted to 
raise seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars for education, 
church erection, home missions, and special work among the 
freedmen and white poor of the South. But the great topics 
discussed were ' ' a Declaration of Faith, Ecclesiastical Polity, 
or the order and government of the Churches." While submit- 
ting the report of the majority on Church Polity, Dr. Leonard 
Bacon, of New Haven, said: " Now we are not to seek a model 
of Congregationalism for Old England. We are not Brownists. 
The Puritans were waiting for government to reform religion. 
Brown has the same relation to the Congregationalists that the 
discoverer of the West Indies has to that of America. Of the 
continent of Congregationalism he knew nothing. ... I 
will have nothing to do with any branch of Congregationalism 
that does not acknowledge the responsibility of each church to 
the whole body." The final declaration was, that "Councils 
are convened when a church desires recognition ; when a 
church asks for advice or help ; when differences are to be com- 



6y6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

posed ; when men whose call of God is recognized by the 
Church are to be separated to the ministry ; when pastors are 
to be inducted into office, or removed ; when a brother claims 
to be aggrieved by Church censure ; when letters of dismission 
are unreasonably refused ; when a church or minister is liable 
to just censure ; and when matters of common moment to the 
churches are to be considered. The decision of a council is 
only advisory. Yet when orderly given, it is to be received as 
the voice of the churches, and an ordinance of God appointed 
in his Word, with reverence and submission, unless inconsistent 
with the Word of God. . . . Fellowship should be with- 
drawn from any Church which is untrue to sound doctrine." 

As to a Declaration of Faith there were two classes of men ; 
one represented by Dr. Sturtevant, of Illinois, who said: "I 
w r ant a declaration of doctrine that goes the whole length of 
stating, in original, living words of our own, in this year of 
grace, 1865, what our view of that (the evangelical) system 
is : . . . such a document as will actually express the faith 
of these churches here and now, with no reference whatever 
to any past formula." Dr. Barstow, of New Hampshire, spoke 
for the other class when he hoped that all would affirm the 
Westminster Catechism and the Savoy Confession. Adjourning 
to Plymouth, the Council made this adjustment: 

"Standing by the rock where the Pilgrims set foot upon 
these shores, upon the spot where they worshiped God, and 
among the graves of the. early generations, we elders and mes- 
sengers of the Congregational Churches of the United States, 
in National Council assembled — like them acknowledging no 
rule of faith but the Word of God — do now declare our adher- 
ence to the faith and order of the apostolic and primitive 
Churches, held by our fathers, and substantially embodied in 
the confessions and platforms which our synods of 1648 and 
1680* set forth or reaffirmed. We declare that the experience 
of the nearly two-and-a-half centuries which have elapsed since 
the memorable day when our sires founded here a Christian 
commonwealth, with all the development of new forms of error 
since their times, has only deepened our confidence in the faith 
and polity of those fathers." 

The scene became sublime. The paper was carried by 

* Cambridge and Saybrook. 



THE BAPTIST CHURCHES. 6yj 

acclamation. One exponent says that " these formulae are 
regarded by those who receive them with much latitude and 
liberty of interpretation, as expressing 'the system of doctrine' 
or the 'substance of doctrine' contained in the Bible, not its 
exact truth in all respects." 

The Oberlin Council of 1871 was the first of a triennial 
series of National Councils to be held by this body, in order 
"to express and foster substantial unity in doctrine, polity, 
and work ; and to consult upon the common interests of all 
the Churches, their duty in the work of evangelization, the 
united development of their resources, and their relation to all 
parts of the kingdom of Christ." Thus the Congregationalists 
have become more fully organized for increased activity. 

III. The Baptist Churches. 

I. The Regular Baptists. Next to Roger Williams, Rhode 
Island was greatly indebted to John Clark, one of its ablest 
legislators. He founded the first Baptist church at Newport 
(1644), and was its pastor for thirty-two years. John Miles led 
over a small band from Swansea, Wales, and gave that name 
to their new home in Massachusetts. They endured hardness, 
they were heavily fined for not attending the legalized Church, 
they were treated as Anabaptists ; but at last they organized 
their own Church (1663), and lived through the severities of 
the laws. " Elias, a wild youth," the son of the famous Benja- 
min Keach, a pastor in London, came into Penn's colony, 
assuming a black dress, bandstand clerical air. He drew a 
crowd to hear him preach. He progressed admirably until he 
was well into his sermon. He then stopped suddenly, became 
confused and betrayed his imposture, wept, confessed, trem- 
bled, and retired in great distress. From that time he dated 
his conversion. He went to a Baptist minister, who immersed 
and ordained him. In 1686 he organized a church near Phila- 
delphia. He traveled through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, 
preaching the Gospel in the wilderness with great success, and 
he is called "the chief apostle of the Baptists in these parts 
of America." 

In 1688 the Baptists had but thirteen churches* in the 

*"Of these seven were in Rhode Island, one at Middletown, New Jersey, 
and one in South Carolina. 



678 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

American colonies. They grew more rapidly after 1706, 
when the pastors of five churches formed the Philadelphia 
Association, the first of its kind in this country. In 1740 they 
had nearly forty churches. They were all Congregationalists in 
polity, and most of them Calvinistic in faith. Immigration 
and the great revivals, in which George Whitefield was so emi- 
nent, rapidly increased their numbers. They shared with other 
Christians in the showers of grace. Wherever there was an 
established form of religion, they were bold dissenters, and, in 
some colonies, heroic sufferers. Dr. Hawks, a historian of the 
Episcopal Church, writes that, "No dissenters in Virginia ex- 
perienced, for a time, a harsher treatment than did the Baptists. 
They were beaten and imprisoned, and cruelty taxed its inge- 
nuity to devise new modes of punishment and annoyance. The 
usual consequences followed. Persecution made friends for its 
victims, and the men who were not permitted to speak in 
public, found willing auditors in the sympathizing crowds who 
gathered around the prisons to hear them preach from the 
grated windows." High fences did not keep the people away, 
nor rattling drums silence the prisoners. In 1770 there were 
scarcely ten Baptist churches in Virginia; in 1790 there were 
more than two hundred. They had then a church among the 
pioneers of Kentucky; "it is supposed to have been the first 
Protestant religious society organized in the Great West." 
Their writers claim that, at the close of the last century they 
had about nine hundred churches, eleven hundred and fifty min- 
isters, and sixty-five thousand members in the United States. 
One of their schools grew into the college at Providence, 
Rhode Island, largely through the efforts of Rev. James Man- 
ning, of Philadelphia, its first president. The charter (1764) 
provided that no religious tests should ever be enjoined, but 
the majority of its directors should be Baptists. It has since 
become Brown University. Its fourth president was Dr. Fran- 
cis W r ayland (1826-56), eminent for his enlarged views, his 
wise administration, his national influence, his contributions 
to mental, moral, and political science, and his efforts in raising 
the standard of education in his own body. He was the 
Chalmers in his denomination ; which has established colle- 
giate and theological institutions throughout the land. Their 
press and Publication Society are of a high rank. Among 



SEVENTH DAY BAPTIST CHURCH. 679 

their many prosperous foreign missions is one in Germany, 
begun in 1834 by Mr. Oncken at Hamburg, and now extended 
through several states, with more freedom of worship than they 
had during the first twenty years. 

2. Among the Calvinistic Baptists of the colonies there 
were some bands who left them on account of Arminianism and 
peculiar views of the Sabbath. In 1681 Samuel Hubbard led 
a party out of the church at Newport, and they organized 
"the first Seventh Day Baptist Church in America." The 
toleration of Rhode Island must have sadly declined, if such 
severe laws were enacted that "John Rogers, a member of 
this church, was sentenced to sit a certain time upon a gal- 
lows, with a rope about his neck, to which he submitted." 
The differentiating principle is that the seventh, and not the 
first, day of the week is the Christian Sabbath. This sect, 
with a German branch, has about one hundred churches in this 
country. Benjamin Randall, a zealous revivalist in New Hamp- 
shire, 1780, insisting upon human ability and a general atone- 
ment, organized the Free Will Baptists ; they united with the 
Free Communion Baptists, and now have about fourteen hun- 
dred churches. The Six Principle (Hebrews vi, 1-6 ) and Anti- 
Mission Baptists reckon one hundred and nine thousand mem- 
bers, and the German Tunkers (Dippers) half that number.* 

3. "The Disciples of Christ" or "Reformed Baptists," are 
more popularly named from their eminent leader, Alexander 
Campbell, whose father came from the secession branch of the 
Presbyterian Church in Ireland, settled in Western Pennsylva- 
nia, and resolved to attempt "the restoration of the original 
unity of the Church" upon some unsectarian basis. Of course 
his failure would at most produce another sect. His son was 
educated in his native Ireland and at Glasgow. They joined 
the Baptists in 18 12, but Alexander did not rest with them. 
He assumed that all Christian sects had departed from the 
original faith and practice; that their defection was owing to 
excessive speculation, metaphysical dogmatism, creeds, litur- 
gies, and books of discipline; and that his views of Scriptural 

*The three branches of Mennonites baptize only believers, but by affusion ; 
have bishops, and choose their clergy by lot, allowing them no salaries. Their 
population, with the new emigrants from Russia, is estimated from sixty thou- 
sand to one hundred and fifty thousand. 



680 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

truth and polity were the exact teachings of the Bible itself.* 
He became the founder of a new sect, which rapidly increased 
in numbers. In his zeal he provided the efficient means and 
agencies of propagation. He laid great stress upon the immer- 
sion of believers only as a means of grace. He was the founder 
and president of Bethany College, Virginia, where he died in 
1855 at the age of sixty-seven years. Excepting baptism and 
perseverance, the Analysis of Doctrines presented by Dr. Rich- 
ardson would be accepted by all evangelical Christians. But 
these are not obligatory upon the ministers and churches, whose 
polity is purely congregational, and among them exists a great 
variety of beliefs. 

4. "The Church of God" is a sect usually named from its 
founder, John Winebrenner, who was for five years the pastor 
of a German Reformed Church (Presbyterian) at Harrisburg, 
Pennsylvania. In 1825 the surrounding churches were blessed 
with remarkable revivals. He earnestly promoted them and 
led many converts to grieve over the divisions in the Church 
of Christ. As a remedy he proposed the organization of free, 
independent churches, "without any sectarian or human name, 
and with no creed and discipline but the Bible" as he inter- 
preted it. The plan was quite successful among the German 
people. In 1830 a convention of ministers and laymen affirmed 
"that there is but one true Church; namely, the Church of 
God, and that it is the bounden duty of all God's people to 
belong to her and none else." They assumed that their body 
was visibly the said Church, with her highest power in the 
eldership, clerical and lay, with an independent polity, and 
with an Arminian theology. Feet-washing was regarded as a 
positive and perpetual ordinance. The Lord's Supper was ad- 
ministered in the evening. Baptism was by immersion and of 
believers only. Great stress was laid upon efforts for revivals, 
benevolent work of every kind, Sunday-schools and missions, 
strict temperance and opposition to slavery, and the various 
Christian graces. When this body had extended itself west of 
,the Ohio, elderships or synods were held annually for co-oper- 
ation and advice, but not legislation. 



* The sincere desire for a more visible unity in the Christian Church is to 
be respected; how to secure it is the great problem among Protestants; but 
wrong assumptions and methods only increase the divisions. 



THE LUTHERAN CHURCH. 68 1 

IV. The Lutheran Church. 

The wars in Germany drove many Lutherans to friendly 
lands. In 1626 there were a few of them in New York, where 
they had a church in 1664, with Jacob Fabricius as pastor. 
The Swedes were on the Delaware. After William Perm had 
offered a free province to the sufferers of Europe, they came in 
multitudes and settled in the middle colonies. The school- 
masters supplied the lack of ministers. The patriarch of Amer- 
ican Lutheranism was Dr. Henry M. Muhlenburg (171 1-87), 
highly educated in the school of the Pietists at Halle, and 
worthy of rank with Francke, Whitefield, and Edwards in the 
work of promoting revivals. The spiritual fain that was falling 
upon all Protestant lands brought reviving grace to the Ger- 
mans. He preached in churches, cabins, barns, fields, anywhere 
that people would gather to hear the Gospel. He was active 
in organizing the synod at Philadelphia, in 1748, when there 
were but eleven Lutheran ministers in this country ; three years 
later there were about forty for a German population of sixty 
thousand. One of his last long journeys was into Georgia 
to visit the Lutheran Salzburgers at Ebenezer, where was the 
grave of Martin Bolzius, who had led the exiles across the 
ocean and been their pastor and the manager of their affairs for 
thirty-two years (1733-65). An earnest patriot, he lived to 
see his Church rejoice in the new freedom of a country in which 
her zeal for education, her numerous colleges and theological 
schools, her presses, missions, benevolent enterprises, and her 
twenty-five hundred ministers, among whom are eminent schol- 
ars and authors, prove her a worthy child of the mother Church 
in the land of Luther, whence came her creed, her polity, and 
her ritual. 

V. The Presbyterian Churches. 

Leaving countries where the titles "Reformed" and "Pres- 
byterian" were used, the colonists, of this order, came to 
America with different names. They spoke different lan- 
guages — Dutch, French, German, and English. They brought 
over their national confessions, polities, and preferences. They 
formed separate organizations, the Huguenots excepted, and 
many of the old distinctions still remain, so that the fact of a 
common faith and polity is often overlooked. 



682 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

I. The Reformed Dutch — now the American Reformed — is 
the oldest Presbyterian Church in America. The first colonists 
of New York had no ministers, but certain " sick-comforters," 
doubtless elders, read the Scriptures and the creeds to the peo- 
ple in a mill. The nucleus of a church was formed about 1619, 
and ten years later Jonas Michaelius organized it and served as 
pastor. He was succeeded in 1633 by Everard Bogardus, who 
brought with him the first school-master in the town. Albany 
claims as early a date for her church and Indian missions. 
There was a good degree of ecclesiastical prosperity even after 
the colony passed under English sway (1664), and the Dutch 
thought they had amply secured their spiritual rights, until 
Governor Fletcher said, in 1693, to the tolerant legislature:. 
" While I stay in this government I will take care that neither 
heresy, schism, nor rebellion, be preached among you." All 
who did not conform (as many did) to the English Church, 
most fully established in New York and four counties adjacent, 
had not long to discover what that meant. The Dutch, who 
had planted civilization there, were oppressed. The yoke was 
galling upon all dissenters until the spirit of 1776 brought them 
liberty. 

The sons of John Livingstone, the exiled Covenanter, had 
become Hollanders. Robert brought to this country the blood 
and brain which made his children so famous in its history. 
John H. Livingstone, educated in Holland, became a leader 
among the Dutch ministers of New York. They had long been 
at strife in the attempt to establish a classis, or presbytery, 
independent of the classis of Amsterdam in the old country. 
Their churches were imperiled by the controversy. Young 
Livingstone mediated between all parties, and in 1772 the 
object was gained. After 181 2 they had a General Synod of 
their own. They adhered to the formularies of the Holland 
Church. In 1764 Dr. Laidlie, a Scot from the Netherlands, 
did most to change the language of the pulpit from the Dutch 
to the English. It was no easy achievement. He preached to 
large audiences in New York and a revival followed. It is said 
that once, after a most refreshing prayer-meeting, the aged 
people gathered around him and said: "Ah! Dominie, many 
an earnest prayer did we offer in Dutch for your coming among 
us, and, truly, the Lord has answered us in English and sent 



THE GERMAN REFORMED CHURCH. 683 

you." The long and earnest efforts to establish a literary and 
theological institution resulted in Rutgers College and the the- 
ological seminary at New Brunswick, New Jersey. One sharp 
controversy, in 1822, led to the secession of Dr. Freligh and 
others, who insisted upon rigid orthodoxy and discipline, and 
organized the "True Reformed Dutch Church," a small body 
which declined fellowship with other denominations, and with- 
held support from the general objects of Christian benevolence. 
The Church which they left has a noble record of Christian 
and humane enterprise, enlightened faith, missionary zeal, and 
patriotism. Its missionaries were the first to enter Japan, in 
1859^, and they led the way to the recent organization of a Pres- 
byterian body, self-governing, independent of foreign control, 
and entitled "the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ in Japan." 

2. The German Reformed Church. Its pioneers in America 
brought from the Palatinate, so often desolated by wars, the 
Heidelberg Catechism. They were joined by Swiss and Hugue- 
nots. From 1740 to 1792 their ministers and churches, chiefly 
in Eastern Pennsylvania, were closely allied to the Reformed 
Dutch Church. In 1792 they formed a General Synod of their 
own. Language divides them into a German and an English 
element. Differences in doctrine have sprung up, but the 
" Mercersburg Theology," with its- theories of sacramental 
grace, Christ's real presence and his mystical life in believers, 
has been ably controverted by the orthodox majority of its six 
hundred and fifty ministers. It has seven collegiate, and five 
theological, institutions. 

3. The Presbyterian Church (specially so named). It had 
elements here long before it had organization. Cotton Mather 
says that, in the reign of Charles I, "divers gentlemen in Scot- 
land wrote to New England inquiring if they might there freely 
exercise their Presbyterian Church-government. And it was 
freely answered that they might." But some of them, with 
Samuel Rutherford, who wrote in 1637, "If I saw a call for New 
England, I would follow it," were soon in London pressing the 
Solemn League, and its various effects led Presbyterians to think 
less of emigrating, until 1660. Still, Mather reckons the num- 
ber who came before 1640 at about four thousand. They were 
not allowed to have a church in Boston. Finding good doc- 
trine, elders, and no liturgy in the Puritan Churches, most of 



684 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

these Scots entered them, and were absorbed in the Congrega- 
tional body.* 

Settlers from New England were a strong element in nearly 
all the early churches on Long Island, and that of Jamaica 
(1656) may be the oldest Presbyterian church in America; the 
same is true of New Jersey. Rev. Abraham Pierson, who seems 
to have been an Episcopalian in England, led about thirty 
families from Connecticut and founded Newark (1667) ; in his 
church were some Scots. He and his son, the first president 
of Yale College, "were moderate Presbyterians." His grandson 
was a pastor at Woodbridge, whose first settlers were "emi- 
grants from Scotland, but principally from New England." 
These are samples of churches whose original polity is still a 
question, but which were Presbyterian early in the next cen- 
tury. Other elements were in the Scotch and Scotch-Irish 
families dispersed through the colonies, with no shepherds to 
collect them in flocks. 

There was need of a man to travel far and near, to organize 
and superintend churches, to secure ministers and support for 
them, and effect the union of them all. A request, but not 
the first, went over the seas, and in 1680 the Presbytery of 
Laggan, in Ireland, which had to convene as a "meeting," thus 
made record : ' ' Colonel Stevens from Maryland, beside Vir- 
ginia, his desire of a godly minister is presented to us. The 
meeting will consider it seriously, and do what they can in it." 
Three men were ordered "to write about this" to other pres- 
byteries. But four of the Laggan ministers were soon thrust 
into jail by a bishop, for observing a fast, and others were dis- 
turbed by the Revolution, so that their last record (168 1) of 
their candidate, Francis Makemie, only shows that they were 
almost ready to license him. Dr. Reid says, ' ' he was ordained 
on this call of Colonel Stevens." He next appears at Barba- 
does, preaching there ; then in Maryland, and thenceforth his 
wisdom, zeal, travels, and successes in organization won him 
the honor of being "the Father of American Presbyterianism." 

Far down in the south-east corner of Maryland he organized 
four churches (1 684-90) ; one was that of Snowhill, where his 
name yet echoes in the names of children whose Scotch and 
Irish ancestors formed it. He earned his own salary, chiefly 

*In 1 718 presbyteries began to be formed in New England. 



PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 685 

from his commercial enterprises. It is hard to find where he 
resided— probably in the saddle, the rude pulpit, and the cab- 
ins of his wide parish, most of his time — until he married 
Naomi Anderson, the daughter of a wealthy merchant at Ac- 
comac, Virginia, and that place became his main center of 
operations. "He is a singular instance of a man engaging in 
the work of an evangelist and of a merchant, and prospering 
in both." His father-in-law left him a large estate. It is not 
decided whether some of his many houses, here and there, 
were used for the storage of goods and produce, or for public 
worship, but probably for both ; and he willed them, and certain 
town lots, to churches. If he was arraigned for preaching in 
Virginia, he proved that the Toleration Act allowed him to 
preach in his own houses. Nearly all salaries were paid in to- 
bacco, and Beverly wrote, in 1705, that the Episcopal clergy 
went where it grew the best. "Those counties where the 
Presbyterian meetings are produce very mean tobacco, and 
for that reason can 't get an orthodox [Episcopal] minister to 
stay amongst them ; but whenever they could, the people very 
orderly went to church." Not being dependent on that kind 
of salary, Makemie had the larger liberty, and greater success. 
He noted it as "an unaccountable humor and singular to most 
rationals," that the people did not build towns, and he published 
a plea for that mode of civilization. Through all the colonies, 
many of the early churches stood in the country. At a com- 
munion season (twice a year) the woods about them were alive 
with people, some of them in tents, there to spend four or five 
days, hearing good long sermons, and singing Rouse's version 

of the Psalms.* 

" And surely God was praised, 
When David's words to David's tune 
Five hundred voices raised." 

Makemie was anxious for help in the vast field. In 1704 
Increase Mather, of Boston, who had a hand in forming a 
united society of Congregationalists and Presbyterians in Lon- 
don, introduced him to it. He urged his plea with good suc- 
cess. The Presbytery of Dublin also gave aid. From Ireland 
he brought back with him John Hampton f and George Mac- 

* Before 1789 Rouse's version began to give place to Watts's Psalms and Hymns. 
fThe Presbytery of Laggan made this minute in 1692: "Each minister 
promises to give some help to keep John Hampton at scoole." 



6$6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

nish, who began their work in Maryland. Other ministers had 
planted churches. Jedediah Andrews had come from New 
England to Philadelphia, about 1698, and gathered a church 
of Scots, Welsh, Huguenots, Swedes, and Puritans. He and 
Makemie were kindred spirits, both riding on wide missionary 
circuits, burdened with the care of the growing Churches, and 
convinced that more union and organization were necessary. 
Largely to their counsels the first presbytery in America owed 
its existence. 

The First Presbytery — that of Philadelphia — is thought to 
have been formed in 1705,* in the "new meeting-house built 
for Andrews," with seven ministers, and we know not how many 
elders. Makemie was moderator. It seems that no written 
constitution was thought necessary. Doubtless all the members 
adhered to the Westminster Confession of Faith, with no spe- 
cific formula of adoption. Makemie cited it, probably the 
Scotch edition, in his famous defense at New York, in 1707. 
He had preached in a private house, and Hampton in some 
neighboring church. For not having Lord Cornbury's license 
they were arrested as "strolling preachers;" the value of their 
certificates from Virginia was denied. They offered to take the 
required oath, but were imprisoned for a month, acquitted by 
a jury, and then fined heavily. The legislature denounced this 
outrage, Cornbury soon left in disgrace for England, and the 
affair was turned to the benefit of religious liberty. 

In 1 717 the Synod of Philadelphia was organized with three 
presbyteries — the new being those of New Castle and Long 
Island. It had twenty-five ministers and more elders. This 
Church had no higher judicatory for seventy-one years. In its 
rapid growth it received ministers who did not adhere equally 
to the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, as binding. 
Thus two parties arose. John Thompson, of Delaware, whose 
orthodoxy was not lifeless, nor fears needless, urged strict sub- 
scription, in 1727-8, as a means of warding off the errors which 
had made inroads upon the Reformed Churches of Great Britain. 

* The first leaf of the Minutes was lost, but the third page bears the date 
of 1706. The eight ministers thereon named were of Scotch and Irish origin, 
except Andrews. John Wilson, of New Castle, a Scot, had come from Connecti- 
cut. Dr. Hodge says that, after 1716, "the proportion of New England min- 
isters was considerably increased. . . . They formed, in 1 728, from a fourth 
to a third of the whole body." 



THE ADOPTING ACT. 687 

On the other side the most eminent man was Jonathan Dickin- 
son, who had been born (.1688) and educated in New England, 
had been eleven years in the synod. He had grown into a 
leader, had won respect for his wisdom and Christian modera- 
tion, and proved his soundness in the Westminster theology. 
' ' He was, strangely enough, altogether opposed to creeds or 
confessions of faith drawn up by uninspired men;" but next to 
Edwards, there was no abler champion of Calvinism in America. 

In the synod of 1729 Thompson and Dickinson were mem- 
bers of the committee upon the exciting overture which resulted 
in the Adopting Act. In it the extremes met harmoniously. 
By it the Westminster Confession and Catechisms were adopted 
"in all essential and necessary articles," except the clauses 
which admitted the coercive power of the civil magistrate in 
affairs of the Church. Provision was made for the good stand- 
ing of ministers and candidates who had scruples about "arti- 
cles not essential." There were still two parties. The question 
of subscription rose occasionally amid the rough waves of two 
others — education and revivals — in which neither party really 
understood its opponents. The "Old Side" insisted on a 
thoroughly educated ministry, but certainly valued piety, and 
disciplined men for the want of it. The "New Side" exam- 
ined more closely into the religious experience of all converts, 
and required the clear evidence of vital piety in all candidates 
for the ministry, but certainly did not think that "God had 
any use for ignorance" in the pulpit. In Philadelphia was the 
school of Dr. Francis Alison, the finest scholar and a foremost 
man of the Old Side. Twenty-five miles above him, in Bucks 
County, was William Tennent, who had left the Episcopal 
Church in Ireland, and had reared the Log College. It sent 
out the young Tennents, the Blairs, and many of the first 
preachers of the great revival, with the founders of the Presby- 
tery of New Brunswick. 

Gilbert Tennent, Pastor at New Brunswick (1726-43), kin- 
dled most fires of the time. His mighty preaching, moral 
courage, zeal for his pronounced faith, and love for the work 
of saving souls, were enough to place him in the foreground 
of events ; but his earlier want of charity, his rashness, his 
unwarranted censures of ministers who opposed his measures, 



68% HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

would have consigned an ordinary man to the silence of history. 
He was not the only one to detect a sad decline of spirituality 
in the churches, but he led in the efforts to arouse them. The 
reports of revivals in New England filled him with enthusiasm. 
Showers of blessing were falling when Whitefield came (1739). 
These two men walked triumphantly over the synod's rule 
(soon modified) which forbade one minister, uninvited, to hold 
meetings in the parish of another. They and Samuel Blair 
"made the woods ring as they rode, with their songs of 
praise," through Chester county, and the remembrance of 
God's wondrous work there has never perished. In Philadel- 
phia Robert Cross was wary of "the itinerant foreigner." 
They said rather hard things of each other; but when the snow 
lay thick in the roofless "great house" of the evangelists Cross 
offered his church to Whitefield, and it was accepted. The 
whole city was absorbed in the mighty work of grace. 

Robert Cross quite fairly represented the Old Side men. 
They said that they opposed, not the revival, but the censori- 
ousness, the alleged extravagances and exciting methods of 
certain revivalists. Some of them must have welcomed White- 
field, who preached among* them to immense audiences, and 
their churches were refreshed. But the revival was chiefly 
associated with New Side men. Was the glorious light too 
brilliant for partisans to see each other clearly? The best men 
on both sides came to feel and sorrowfully confess that they 
had erred exceedingly against each other. As they forgave, 
we may wisely forget, their mutual faults. Our wonder is that 
the great revival, which absorbed the minds of their people, 
and extended far beyond the field of their strifes, did not 
restrain them from schism. 

The First. Disunion was a result, not directly of the revival, 
but of the human nature which even refreshing grace had not 
subdued. The organizers of the Presbytery of New Brunswick 
(1738) were New Side men, anxious to see pious ministers in 
the wide and ripening field, but too independent of Church law 
and order. They were charged with hastening unqualified men 
into the ministry, and sending them uninvited into other pres- 
byteries. The result was that the majority in the synod of 
1 741 took severe measures, and wrote, "We excluded the four 



SAMUEL DAVIES. 

Tennents, Blair, and others." Another result was that the 
New Side men and the New York Presbytery, in 1745, united 
and formed the Synod of New York.* 

Both synods were active in the two most pressing enter- 
prises — missions and education. Many a pastor hadf his circuit 
of churches, and hardy yOung men to study classics and the- 
ology with him, and help in the vegetable as well as the spirit- 
ual kingdom. Pioneers gathered flocks in the wilds of the then 
South and West. The needed college was started at Elizabeth, 
New Jersey, and in charge of Jonathan Dickinson during the 
last year of his life (1746-47). It was then moved to Newark, 
with Rev. Aaron Burr as its president. In 1756 he went to 
Princeton with it, rechartered as the College of New Jersey. 
Who would secure its endowment? 

Samuel Davies (1723-61), a farmer's son in Delaware, a 
student in Samuel Blair's school, was the first American orator 
whose sermons are still regarded as a model for the pulpit. 
He is celebrated as the father of the Presbytery of Hanover, 
the first in Virginia ; the defender of the right of dissenters to 
preach in that State, from which John Rodgers had been ex- 
pelled for the Gospel's sake ; the promoter of revivals, bringing 
to the front the truly evangelical spirit of his Church and creed ; 
and the collector of funds (along with Gilbert Tennent) in Eng- 
land and Scotland for the college at Princeton, in whose presi- 
dency he succeeded Jonathan Edwards and spent nearly the 
last two years of his life, dying at the age of thirty-eight. His 
successor, Samuel Finley, said of him : ' ' He was strict, not 
bigoted ; he gloried more in being a Christian than in being a 
Presbyterian, though he was the latter from principle." 

All these five presidents were earnest to repair the broken 
unity. Gilbert Tennent and Robert Cross, both pastors in the 
City of Brotherly Love, now saw eye to eye, and had ' ' pleas- 
ing views of a comfortable union." It was effected in 1758, 
both synods holding the Westminster Confession as they had 
always done, and agreeing in the education of candidates, and 
"in their sentiments concerning the nature of a work of grace." 
Thus the Synod of New York and Philadelphia was formed. 



* In 1833 Dr. Ashbel Green wrote that " the New Side men were as strict 
Presbyterians as their opponents. The love of Congregationalism, or lax Pres- 
byterianism, was- not the cause of their separation from the old synod/' 

44 



69O HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

In it were ninety ministers. Ashbel Green (1 762-1 841), a sol- 
dier of the Revolution, may be taken as a representative of the 
new race of ministers who baffled the infidelity of the age, and 
led their Church through the war and its desolating influences, 
and into the great movements which enlisted her forces during 
fifty years.* The General Assembly, the highest judicatory 
of the Presbyterian Church, was created by the synod in 1788, 
when it slightly revised its standards, so as to adapt them to 
the laws of a tolerant republic. The effort to unite all the 
Presbyterian denominations of the country under this constitu- 
tion was not successful. 

From the first there had been voluntary comity between 
the Presbyterian and the Congregational Churches. Ashbel 
Green opened the door to a more systematic co-operation, and 
afterwards deeply regretted it. The assembly adopted, in 
1 80 1, "A Plan of Union between Presbyterians and Congre- 
gationalists in the new settlements." Under it missions were 
extended ; but too many of the new churches were organized 
on a compromise of two polities — they had no elders, and 
yet belonged to presbyteries. The necessity for a division of 
labor, and for specific funds, produced those measures which 
finally resulted in the Presbyterian Boards of Missions, Educa- 
tion, and Publication. In 18 12 the Theological Seminary at 
Princeton was established — the first of thirteen now existing. 
The Alexanders, Dr. Miller, and Dr. Charles Hodge, gave it a 
fame throughout Christendom. 

The Second Disunion, like the First, began with questions 
concerning revivals and education. The wonderful revivals in 
Kentucky (1797- 1805) created a demand for more Presbyterian 
ministers. f The aged David Rice, "the father of the Church 

* In 1775 tne Synod issued a pastoral letter to all the churches, prepared 
by Dr. Witherspoon and others, by which it took its stand on the side of the 
Congress and the union of the colonies. In 1787 it urged the education and 
liberation of the negroes in bondage, and recommended "the use of the most 
prudent measures, consistent with the interests and the state of civil society in 
the countries where they live, to procure eventually the final abolition of slavery 
in America." Dr. Green probably wrote the Assembly's famous deliverance of 
1 81 8 on slavery. 

t Barton W. Stone and four other ministers withdrew from the Synod of 
Kentucky (1803) ; James O'Kelly left the Methodist Church in North Carolina; 
Abner Jones separated from the Vermont Baptists. These men, with their fol- 
lowers, opposing "sectarian names and human creeds," assumed the title of 



THE THIRD DISUNION. 69 1 

in the West," thought that pious, practical men might be suf- 
ficiently trained in the standards, and licensed, without classical 
study. The Cumberland Presbytery licensed a few men of 
warm piety and experience, but of limited knowledge. The 
matter was before the Synod of Kentucky and the General 
Assembly for years (1804-14), and the presbytery was dis- 
solved, partly for alleged errors. Three of the men in ques- 
tion — Ewing, King, M'Adam — having been ordained, assumed 
to restore the presbytery (18 10), and thus founded the Cum- 
berland Presbyterian Church. Education was not neglected, 
but a high standard was not required. The Westminster Con- 
fession and Catechisms were modified, chiefly by articles con- 
trary to the doctrines of predestination and limited atonement. 
Colleges and the press have greatly elevated the standard of 
education in this energetic and prosperous body, which enrolls 
several hundreds of energetic ministers. 

The Third Disunion was the result of a controversy sharp, 
painful, long, and so recent as to present a most delicate 
theme. It seems to have had its roots in the Plan of Union 
(1801), and its chief occasion in the teaching and first trial of 
Rev. Albert Barnes (1830). Two schools of thought and 
policy arose, popularly designated as the old, or more strict, 
and the new. Between these there was what Dr. Green de- 
scribed in 1834, as "a host of peace men, moderate men, 
sound in the faith," although he questioned the estimates of 
Prof. Samuel Miller, who had written "that a very large ma- 
jority — nay, nineteen-twentieths of the whole number of our 
ministers — are sufficiently near to the Scriptures, and to each 
other, in respect to all the essentials of truth, to be comfort- 
ably united in Christian fellowship and co-operation, I can not 
allow myself to doubt." But the complaints, warnings, testi- 
monies, protests, and appeals, which lie thick in the records of 
six years after 1831, show that real and serious differences ex- 
isted. During the first five of those years the strict inter- 
preters of the Confession were a minority in the General 
Assembly. They felt that the Church was in great danger, 
and truth must be saved. They objected to the Plan of Union 
as fostering Congregationalism in the Churches; to maintaining 

Christians, and formed the "Christian Connection." They are immersionists, 
with about sixty thousand adherents. 



692 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

voluntary (undenominational) societies as equal or preferable to 
the Presbyterian Boards, for supporting missions and candidates 
for the ministry ; to the theory that the General Assembly had 
only advisory powers ; to the formation of presbyteries on the 
principle of ''elective affinity," rather than by geographical 
lines ; to alleged new measures in promoting revivals ; to alleged 
errors in doctrine, for some of which trials were instituted 
against Revs. Albert Barnes, George Duffield, and Lyman 
Beecher ; to the acquittal of these ministers actually or vir- 
tually by the General Assembly ; to an alleged growth of 
"New England theology" in the Church ; to the refusal of cer- 
tain presbyteries to examine intrant ministers ; to the ordina- 
tion of men who were said to be unqualified, unsound, and 
intent upon being evangelists, and not pastors ; to the election 
of elders to serve for a limited time, and to other alleged de- 
partures from constitutional order, or defects in discipline. 
Many of them thought that all these were favored by the New 
School men, and that the "moderates" could not secure reform. 
The New School objected especially to a demand for a more 
rigid adoption and construction of the Confession of Faith than 
the constitution required ; to the imputation of their assent to 
the Confession in any other than "the obvious, known, and 
established meaning of the terms," or of putting some private, 
broad, and unusual interpretation upon the phrase, "the sys- 
tem of doctrine;" to appeals from the constitutional courts to 
the Church at large, through annual conventions, in which one 
party issued acts and testimonies against the alleged errors of 
another party, and thus (said the Assembly of 1834) "pub- 
lished to the world, ministers in good and regular standing 
as heretical or dangerous, without being constitutionally tried 
and condemned;" to construed censures upon the General 
Assembly by conventions which it did not authorize ; * to the 

*The Convention of 1833, at Cincinnati, issued its memorial; that of 1834 
sent out an Act and Testimony against errors, and recommended all approving 
ministers, elders, sessions, presbyteries, and synods to subscribe it. The Prince- 
ton Review, of 1834, objected to this use of it as a "Test Act" or a "new 
Solemn League and Covenant," or an "extra constitutional method of ascer- 
taining and rallying the friends of truth." The Review insisted upon order as 
well as orthodoxy. Opposing "New England theology" it sought to check 
extreme measures. In 1835 the Pittsburg Convention renewed the "Testi- 
monies," and so did that of Philadelphia in 1837. 



THE CRISIS. 693 

judicial condemnation of printed opinions in such modes as to 
condemn the author as heretical ; to any ' ' exclusive mode 
of conducting missions," and to restricting the support of vol- 
untary societies, by according to the Presbyterian Boards a 
more imperative claim upon the gifts of the Presbyterian 
Churches. 

The crisis came in 1837, when the General Assembly in 
Philadelphia, among other acts, testified against sixteen errors ; 
abrogated the Plan of Union ; disowned or exscinded four 
synods in Western New York and Ohio, directing the strictly 
Presbyterian ministers and churches therein to join the strict 
presbyteries adjacent ; required five other synods to take action 
upon reported errors ; and barred from the churches the vol- 
untary societies. Then came a year of intense excitement 
throughout the land, and a rallying of forces. The exscinded 
synods asserted their right of existence, and their presbyteries 
sent thirty ministers and twenty elders as commissioners to the 
next Assembly in Philadelphia. Their commissions were re- 
fused. All motions for their enrollment were declared out 
of order. The minority resolved, amid all the confusion in the 
house, "to organize the General Assembly of 1838, in the few- 
est words, the shortest time, and with the least interruption 
possible." They elected clerks, and Dr. Samuel Fisher mod- 
erator, and, on motion, adjourned to the First Presbyterian 
Church. Dr. David Elliot had not left the chair, and the 
remaining Assembly proceeded with business. 

Thus the Church had branched. There were two General 
Assemblies with rival claims to constitutionality. The first 
efforts to adjust their differences failed ; they had to be left to 
law, time, and grace. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania 
decided in favor of the Old School, entitling them to the 
strictly denominational property of the whole body before its 
division. In each branch there were men of eminent ability, 
scholarship, spirituality, and devotedness to that system of 
doctrine and polity which was held in common. The pulpit, 
the press, the chair of theology, were means of power. Each 
branch increased its agencies for education, literature, and mis- 
sions. As early as 1850 the New School Assembly adopted 
measures which brought into existence five permanent com- 
mittees similar to the boards of "the other branch." Over- 



694 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

tures for reunion began to appear, when each body was. rent 
by slavery and war. 

The Fourth Disunion was twofold. In 1857 four synods in 
Southern States withdrew from the New School Assembly on 
account of its deliverances against slavery. They formed a 
United Synod, and afterwards joined their brethren in the same 
States, who withdrew from the Old School Assembly during the 
civil war (1861-65). Thus a new Presbyterian Church was 
formed. Impoverished by war, it has shown great energy in 
educational, theological, and missionary enterprises. 

The reunion of the Old and New School branches was the 
result of grace, wisdom, moderation, a growing mutual confi- 
dence, a desire for combined effort in the extension of the 
Gospel, and the discussion of plans, during five years. The 
deep interest every-where felt, while mistakes were cleared 
away, doubts removed, and the culmination reached, was 
voiced by one of the Assemblies when it discussed the plan fa- 
vored by the other, and recognized ' ' this proposal as a part 
of the great movement of our day, which is seeking better to 
express the essential unity of the Church of Christ ;" and said 
that ' * the favor of God has been shown in the outpouring of the 
Spirit upon the joint efforts of Christians in revivals of religion. 
Our own hearts have here felt most convincingly the influences 
of that Spirit, when in joint supplications for the reunion of 
our separated Presbyterian family. Mutual love and confidence 
fill the hearts of believers. The spirit of wisdom seems to be 
imparted to our councils for reunion, and from all branches of 
the Church the prayer is going up for a speedy realization 
of that oneness for which our Redeemer prayed. And when 
God so manifestly points the way, and opens the path where 
was a sea of difficulties before, it is for his people to go for- 
ward." The reunion was theoretically effected by the two 
Assemblies in an adjourned and joint meeting at Pittsburg, 
1869, and practically realized the next year in the one Assem- 
bly at Philadelphia, "on the doctrinal and ecclesiastical basis 
of the common standards." No new terms or tests were 
enacted. The Church expressed her joy, gratitude, and liber- 
ality in the Memorial Fund of five millions of dollars. In the 
union there is strength, as shown in the enlarged enterprises, 
home and foreign, of this Church. 



PAN-PRESBYTERIAN COUNCIL. 695 

As this Church was the first to take official action in regard 
to a great Council, postponed from Calvin's time, that move- 
ment may here be recorded. As early as 1868 the idea of 
such a council found utterance on both sides of the Atlantic. 
Among its chief promoters were Dr. James M'Cosh, and Dr. 
Philip Schaff, who were representatives of the Presbyterianism of 
Europe by birth and wide acquaintance, and of America by 
adoption, scholarship, and eminent position. In 1873, the official 
proposals of the Assemblies in the United States (north), and 
in Ireland, gave it a more definite shape. The conference in 
London, July, 1875, attended by sixty-four representatives of 
twenty-one Presbyterian bodies, formed "the Alliance of the 
Reformed Churches throughout the World, holding the Presby- 
rian system," to meet ordinarily once in three years, and to 
have simply advisory powers. The first meeting was held at 
Edinburgh, Scotland, July, 1877, and attended by some three 
hundred delegates from about forty-five Reformed Churches, 
and representing twenty-one thousand and five hundred con- 
gregations, existing in various parts of the earth. In these 
there were reported nineteen thousand seven hundred and 
ninety ordained ministers, of whom nearly seven hundred were 
missionaries, and about twenty-one thousand and five hundred 
congregations. Of these ministers two hundred and sixty-two 
were credited to Australia ; one hundred and six, to New Zea- 
land ; and one hundred and thirteen, to South Africa. Certain 
members of this Council expressed the hope that it would be 
"the stepping-stone to a general assembly of all the truly 
Christian Churches of the whole world." A Pan-Protestant 
Council ought to be among the coming events.* The nearest 
approach to it is the Evangelical Alliance, organized in London, 
1846, on a sound Protestant basis. Its sessions in different 
lands, especially that in New York, 1873, has greatly promoted 
the sympathetic union and active co-operation of evangelical 
Christians throughout the world. 

4. The United Presbyterian Church. Its elements came from 
three denominations of Scotch origin, which adhered to the 



* A Pan- Anglican Council was held in London, in 1867, and also in 1878; 
at the latter one hundred bishops were present, from the British Isles and Colo- 
nies, and the United States. Arrangements for a Pan-Methodist Conference are 
now in progress. 



6g6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Westminster standards, used Rouse's version of the Psalms, and 
held that sacramental communion with other bodies involved a 
sanction of their principles. Zealous for the distinctions in the 
Church of their fathers, the early settlers in this country reared 
patriotic sons for the battles of the Revolution. Our subject 
brings two of these bodies to the front. 

(i) The Associate (Secession) was organized in Eastern 
Pennsylvania, mainly by Rev. Alexander Gellatly (1753-61), a 
firm defender of his principles, and earnest for the Scottish 
Covenants. After part of its two presbyteries left it, in 1782 
(see below), it so prospered during seventy-five years that it 
had twenty-one presbyteries, and nearly one hundred and fifty 
ministers. 

(2) The Associate Reformed Church was constituted, in 
1782, by uniting a part of the Associate with the majority of 
the Reformed (Covenanter) body.* This new organization 
founded, at New York, 1804, the first chartered Theological 
Seminary in the United States. Under Dr. J. M. Mason it 
became very popular. He was not only a strong theologian, 
eloquent preacher, the advocate of open communion, and of 
union with the Presbyterian Assembly (into which he led a part 
of his synod), but a man of great public influence, "whose 
praise is in both hemispheres." This Church was considerably 
stronger than the Associate in 1858, when nearly the whole of 
the two bodies formed a union under the name of the United 
Presbyterian Church. Among its most prosperous foreign mis- 
sions is that in Egypt. 

VI. The Methodist Churches. 

It is a question whether the first Methodist Society in Amer- 
ica was gathered by Philip Embury, in the city of New York, 
or by Robert Strawbridge, not far from Frederick, Maryland. 
After 1766 each was a model for others, and a base of opera- 
tions. John Wesley sent over lay-preachers, and they had 
great success. Among the itinerant missionaries were Richard 
Wright and Francis Asbury, sent over in 1771, and the latter 



* The Reformed Presbyterian Church was continued by the minority, and it 
still exists. The Presbytery of Pittsburg joined the Presbyterian Church in 
1870. A minority of the Associates still have their synod. These bodies are 
also represented in the Southern States. 



THE METHODIST CHURCHES. 



697 



was soon appointed a general supervisor of the preachers and 
societies in the colonies. Their first conference was held in 
1773, at Philadelphia, representing about one thousand one 
hundred and sixty members of classes. Dr. Bangs says that 
"in the year 1776, after the revolutionary contest had com- 
menced, persecution against the Methodist missionaries found a 
pretext in the fact that most of them were from England, and 
that some of them had manifested a partiality for their king 
and country, and, moreover, that they were all under the direc- 
tion of a leader (Wesley) who had written against the Amer- 
ican principles and measures." And yet they seem to have 
increased. Nearly all the English preachers returned home, 
except Francis Asbury. He retired to the house of Judge 
White, one of the members, in Delaware, and preached in pri- 
vate circles for a year (1778), while Freeborn Garrettson was 
flogged and imprisoned in Virginia, for his earnestness in his 
wide circuit. 

The Revolution helped to give the Methodist societies inde- 
pendence. It separated them from the Church of England, to 
which their eighty preachers had adhered. To meet the de- 
mand of nearly fifteen thousand members for the sacraments, 
Dr. Thomas Coke* was sent over as the first bishop (1784), 
and he began the systematic work which made the societies a 
Church — the Methodist Episcopal — one of the most thoroughly 
organized that ever existed. That year the conference at Bal- 
timore elected Asbury a bishop, and adopted Wesley's abridg- 
ment of the Thirty-nine English Articles, which continue to be 
the standard of doctrine. The first General Conference was 
held in 1792 in Baltimore, and in 1800 it represented about 
two hundred and ninety preachers and sixty-four thousand and 
nine hundred members. f Already Bishop Asbury had started 
the first Sunday-school in America (1788), and toiled hard to rear 
a seminary at Abingdon, Maryland. Young men were taught in 



* Chapter XXIII, Section III, 4. He resided in America only about half 
of his time, and died in 18 14. 

t The General Conference, the highest judicatory, meets once in four years. 
It is composed of the bishops and delegates from the annual conferences, each 
of which embraces the ministers of a certain State or territory. These are 
divided into districts, each with its presiding elder. The bishops preside at all 
conferences, and ordain. They itinerate, and are elected by the General 
Conference. 



698 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

it during eight years, when it was burnt to the ground. An- 
other was erected in Baltimore, and it went out in flames 
(1796), and the bishop said, "I feel convinced that our call is 
not to build colleges." Yet he would have a high -school in 
every conference. The number of his long journeys, his ser- 
mons, and his meetings with conferences, through forty -five 
years, would have astonished even John Wesley. When or- 
daining a brother, he lifted up a Bible, and most powerfully 
said, "This is the minister's battle-ax, this is his sword; take 
this and conquer." It is said that when he was ending one of 
his vast circuits, riding along with sad thoughts of the little 
good he had done, a woman hurried to grasp his hand and 
tearfully thank him for the sermon, a year before, to which she 
ascribed her conversion. "Glory to God!" said he. "One 
soul the fruit of a year's labors ! I will gladly go round the 
continent again." Garrettson said, "He prayed the most and 
the best of any man I ever knew." Children were named after 
him; and, in executing his last will (1816), several hundred 
copies of the Bible were given to persons who bore the name 
of Francis Asbury. 

In 18 19 the Missionary Society was formed "to assist the 
several annual conferences to extend their missionary labors 
throughout the United States and elsewhere." Mission work 
has been a peculiarity of this body, not only in neglected dis- 
tricts, on the borders westward, and among emigrants of for- 
eign speech, but also in nearly every land on the globe. It has 
been at the front in social and moral reforms, in benevolent 
enterprises and patriotism, and has taken a leading part in the 
recent advances of Sunday-school work. 

After the year 18 17 seminaries- and colleges were rapidly 
founded. Dr. Wilbur Fisk gave an impetus to higher scholar- 
ship, won a more deserving respect for his Church among other 
denominations and public men, both in America and Europe, 
and was in demand, far and near, to address societies estab- 
lished in behalf of the Bible, Education, Tracts, Missions, 
Sunday-schools, and Temperance. Twice refusing to be a 
bishop, he devoted the last nine years of his life (1830-39) to 
building up the Wesleyan University, at Middletown, Con- 
necticut, of which he was the first president. He must have 
deplored the human nature which too often has broken out in 



CLEAVAGE IN METHODISM 699 

large councils when he said, "A camp-meeting* is a heaven, 
compared with a General Conference." His successor, Dr. 
Stephen Olin, so attached to the Greek Testament, at home or 
in his tent by the Jordan, gave to the mind and pen of Meth- 
odism a vigor which is manifest in ethical, scientific, theolog- 
ical, historical, Biblical, and cyclopaedic literature; thus holding 
fair rivalry with denominations which are credited with an ear- 
lier inheritance of scholarship. The Book Concern, founded in 
1788, with its great variety of publications, has an immense 
influence. Wesley's antipathy to slavery was generally enter- 
tained by his early followers. They insisted upon emancipation. 

The cleavage in American Methodism was due largely to 
race, slavery, episcopacy, and lay -representation, and not to 
doctrines of theology. The chief separations from the original 
body are : (1) The Methodist Episcopal Church in Canada, the 
result of a peaceful secession soon after the war of 1812, and 
now having three annual conferences. (2) The Methodist 
Protestant Church, organized in 1830, without bishops, and 
with lay-representation ; slavery divided it into two bodies, and 
the northern is now entitled the Methodist Church. (3) The 
Methodist Episcopal Church South, organized in 1845-46, on 
account of slavery. It has about one-third the strength of the 
body which it left, f The general rule of the mother Church 
has been to let her seceding children go in peace, with 
their property and her blessing. She has experienced no 
revolution. 

The centenary of Methodism in America was observed, in 
1866, "with devout thanksgivings, by special religious services 
and liberal thank-offerings." The contributions amounted to 
about $8, 709, 500, showing that recent patriotism had not sadly 
affected the spirit of liberality. In 1872 lay delegates were ad- 
mitted to seats and votes in the General Conference. 

In 1849 this Church established missions in Germany, where 
it has an organized conference, about four hundred places of 

* The Presbyterian conventicles of Scotland reappeared in their American 
camp-meetings at an early date. 

t The Evangelical Association, popularly named from J. Albright, was or- 
ganized (1803) independently among the Germans, on a Methodist basis. There 
are three colored, or African, branches of American Methodism. There are 
also the Wesleyan, Free, and Primitive Methodists, and " the United Brethren 
in Christ." 



700 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

worship, an active press, and a flourishing theological school at 
Frankfort. Methodism has organized bodies in Australia, 
Africa, and the West Indies. 

VII. Unitarians and Universalists. 

These bodies, assuming to be Liberal Christians, but having 
no authorized creeds, claim to be Protestants, though not evan- 
gelical. Nearly all Unitarians believe in the final salvation of 
all men ; but some Universalists believe that Jesus Christ is the 
God-man, the Mediator, through whom alone the final salvation 
of all men will be effected. 

After the American Unitarian Association was formed, in 
1825,* it united the efforts of its members, but did not unify 
their beliefs. They were a school of thinkers, rather than an 
earnest sect intent on extending the fixed principles of a 
Church. William E. Channing (1 780-1 842) was their first em- 
inent leader — gentle, kind, philanthropic, courteous, eloquent, 
and long the "bright particular star" of Boston, casting an 
influence through Europe, where his writings are still repub- 
lished. His early Arianism did not satisfy him, and he wrote, 
the year before his death, "I am little of a Unitarian, have 
little sympathy with the system of Priestley and Belsham, and 
stand aloof from all but those who strive and pray for clearer 
light." The position of others has been, not the positive denial 
of the Trinity, but the refusal to affirm the doctrine. Opinion 
has varied from a type of Sabellianism and Arianism to the 
eclecticism of Theodore Parker, who sought the primitive or 
absolute religion in all systems on earth, Christ being the chief 
among the sages of antiquity. Several of the young minis- 
ters — Sparks, Edward Everett, R. W. Emerson — left the pulpit 
and devoted themselves to historical, classical, or general liter- 
ature, or exchanged Christianity for philosophy. Such men as 
Dr. Ware, Norton, and Sears either defended their system or 
made contributions to Christian apologetics, but quite gener- 
ally culture and humanity overshadowed theology. 

The Universalists in England began to be organized in 1750, 
by John Relly. One of his converts was John Murray, who 
came to America, 1770, preached his doctrines in all the colo- 
nies north of the Delaware, served as a chaplain in the revolu- 

* Section II of this chapter. 



THE FRIENDS. 



701 



tionary army, and gathered his first society at Gloucester, Mas- 
sachusetts. A few preachers left the evangelical Churches 
and joined him. They were mainly orthodox, except in refer- 
ence to future punishment, holding that God's love would 
finally annihilate all evil in the universe, and that after the 
last judgment those who had never repented and believed in 
Christ would suffer for a time in proportion to their sins, but 
finally be saved through the atonement of Christ and the power 
of the Holy Spirit. Hosea Ballou (1790), an Arian, taught 
that all punishment is visited upon men in this life on earth, 
and that all the dying pass at once into a state of bliss. This 
doctrine was the more popular for a century, but the former 
has now the prevalence, owing largely to the culture and more 
fully developed theology of the Restorationists. They claim 
sixty thousand adherents, or about twice the number of the 
Unitarians. 

The Annihilationists, led by Storrs and Hudson, think that 
God will remove all evil from the universe by a different mode. 
They teach that death is the utter destruction of the souls of 
the impenitent, and occurs with that of their bodies. They 
form a school, rather than a sect, and have a few adherents 
even among evangelical Churches. 

VIII. The Friends, or Quakers. 

In 1672 George Fox was struggling through "the great 
bogs" of the Dismal Swamp, in the Carolinas, 'Maying abroad 
anights by a fire," and seeking Friends who lived lonely in the 
woods. Here and there he had "a sound and precious meet- 
ing, opening many things concerning the light and spirit of 
God that is in every one." Thus he went up through all the 
colonies, renewing the courage and hope of his people, and 
leaving the New England for the Old, nine years before William 
Penn arrived. Penn's writings, with those of Barclay and 
Penington, kept them near to evangelical truth. They organ- 
ized on the plan of local conferences, one within another, held 
monthly, quarterly, and annually, the Yearly Meetings (synods) 
being attended by the Friends within a State or a part of it. 
They were not aggressive. Many of their descendants passed 
into other denominations. They lacked the power of the pul- 
pit. They abhorred war and every sort of oppression. They 



702 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

advocated moral reforms and philanthrophic movements. Their 
attempts to civilize the Indians have not been as successful as 
those of other denominations. They have a Tract and a Bible 
Society and Sunday-schools. The poet Whittier is their popular 
representative in literature. 

Elias Hicks, of Long Island (1827), boldly denied the 
divine authority of the Holy Scriptures, the divinity and the 
atonement of Christ, and led a party into mere deism. His 
followers are about two-fifths of the Quakers, and are strongly 
opposed by the orthodox Friends, whose numbers are about 
one hundred thousand. 

IX. The Roman Catholic Church. 

In the United States there is no other Church that pays 
allegiance to a foreign power. It is Roman, and, with all the 
care of popes, it made little advance during the colonial period. 
In 1775 it had scarcely twenty-five thousand adherents in the 
colonies. It extended mainly from three centers, from Mary- 
land along the Atlantic coast, from Louisiana far up into the 
valley of the Mississippi, and from Canada. In 1789 it had a 
bishop at Baltimore. It grew by immigration, Jesuit missions, 
the activity of various celibate orders, nunneries, and schools 
for teaching the fine arts. Its priests have set examples of toil, 
hardship, fidelity, and pastoral care, following up the lines of 
new railways, hasting with a rude chapel in the villages of poor 
cabins, bearing the cross and confessional to the miners, or 
walking ten miles to warn a servant not to attend the family 
worship of her employers, nor listen to one word from a Prot- 
estant Bible. These earnest men have largely won the success 
which is evinced by the cathedrals, hospitals, seminaries, and 
bishops in our cities. Other men have sought to turn the 
stream of politics in favor of their Church, and, in the lowest 
ward-meeting, up to the highest legislature, their skill has been 
marvelous. Opposing "sectarian schools" they have urged 
their claim to a share of the public funds, as no other Church 
has done ; or helped to secure the rejection of the Bible from 
the public schools. * They have had the help of unbelievers and 

*This began in New York in 1840, and has extended to other cities. In 
1852 the National Plenary Council of Roman Catholics condemned public 
schools. 



THE DOMINION OF CANADA. 703 

of some Protestants, in an effort to exclude the sacred Scrip- 
tures from all places of education maintained by the state. 
The six millions of the Roman Catholic population in this land, 
wield their greatest power through politics and education. 

They have not been lacking in men of ability, with the pen 
and press. They have drawn two of their best editors from 
Protestant ranks — M'Masters and Brownson. They have been 
defended by strong controversialists — Hughes and Purcell. But 
none have eclipsed Dr. Kenrick, Archbishop of Baltimore 
(1 797-1 863), "who was esteemed among all denominations as 
an amiable and scholarly man, of great and varied learning, 
particularly in the department of dogmatic theology. * Though 
earnestly devoted to the work and interests of his own Church, 
he was not wanting in charity and kindness to men of other 
creeds." He published a new version of the Bible with a full 
commentary. The American prelates in the Vatican Council 
of 1870 zealously maintained the dogma of papal infallibility. 
Four years later the long desire for a cardinal in this country 
was gratified, and the red hat was placed upon Archbishop 
M'Closkey, of New York. 

X. The Dominion of Canada. 

By the federal union of eight provinces, since 1866, this do- 
minion extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Except 
its continued allegiance to Great Britain, and the Roman Cath- 
olic influence along the St. Lawrence River, it is quite similar 
to the United States in the history of its colonies and Churches. 
No Church is now established by the state, except the Roman 
Catholic in the Province of Quebec by the terms of the con- 
quest. Newfoundland is not in the union. The population of 
the Dominion is estimated at nearly four millions, of which 
about one million five hundred thousand are Roman Catholics. 

The spirit of union produced two notable results. Three 
Methodist bodies — the New Connection and two Wesleyan — 
united in 1874, and formed the "Methodist Church of Canada," 
with over one hundred thousand members. The Episcopal and 
the Primitive Methodists did not enter into the union. In 1875 
four of the several Presbyterian bodies were united on the basis 



* His theological and ethical works were written in Latin, seven volumes, 
and republished in Europe. 



704 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

of their common Westminster standards, with the title of "The 
Presbyterian Church in Canada." The union was enthusiastic- 
ally effected in a country ' ' where only ninety years ago there 
existed only one small presbytery of some four ministers ; its 
first General Assembly being held in a province (Quebec) 
where popery is the dominant religion, and in a city (Montreal) 
where its chief strength lies ; the union also taking place at a 
time very critical in the history of the Dominion, when, in the 
councils of Rome, a resolution had been registered to win back 
Canada to the Latin Cross." The Protestants of Canada have 
shown remarkable energy in missions, and in the establishment 
of collegiate and theological institutions. 

Review and Outlook. 

Our history has necessarily followed out the diversities of 
the Church, in doctrines, polities, modes of existence and wor- 
ship. Underneath them has been that vitalizing Christianity 
which has produced results common to all its true adherents, 
and is greater than any form of the Church. A volume might 
be written upon the spiritual unity of all believers who have 
trusted in the one Christ, received the one Spirit, and hoped for 
the one heaven, during the past centuries. To all who had 
justifying faith in Christ belonged the unifying name of Chris- 
tians. They constituted the invisible Church of God. With 
that faith were "the things that accompany salvation," in 
varying degrees ; the proofs were to be seen in their daily and 
spiritual life. 

The common life of Christians has ever varied with the 
degrees of material civilization in different ages and countries. 
Tertullian said to the pagans, "We live with you, have the 
same food, dress, and furniture, the same daily wants: we trade 
and travel with you, serve in your armies, and in your fields, 
and meet you in the forum." Their best homes were once the 
ancient Greek and Roman houses: later, many of them dwelt 
in the rude cabins of the Germanic tribes, or gathered about 
the British hearth-stone in the center of a room, the smoke 
passing, without a chimney, through an opening in the thatched 
roof. Domestic comforts were rare in the New Europe, until 
Christianity made the people cleanlier, more refined, kindlier, 
more industrious, thrifty, honest, inventive of useful arts, and 



THE SPHERE OF CHARITY. 705 

intent upon personal culture. "The carpenter's son" was a 
teacher of civilization, by means of his elevating Gospel. So- 
cial life was long deranged by monastic modes of society, when 
"the religious" were monks and nuns. 

The truly religious life of Christians has ever been most 
pure, simple, and blissful, when the Bible has most fully regu- 
lated their minds, consciences, hearts, habits, and labors, and 
when the home has been a school and a church. It has been 
most formal, servile, full of routine and ceremony, when they 
have been superstitious, ritualistic, and devoted to penances. 
It was more rigid and morose under popery than under Puri- 
tanism. The one made it mechanical with the notion of merit: 
the other, ethical with the idea of abstinence from sin and 
worldliness. The family worship of the early Church was lost 
in the Middle Ages, but restored by the great Reformation. 

It is said that "surely no achievements of the Christian 
Church are more truly great than those which it effected in the 
sphere of charity. For the first time in the history of mankind, 
it has inspired many thousands of men and women, at the sacri- 
fice of all worldly interests, and often in circumstances of extreme 
discomfort or danger, to devote their entire lives to the single 
object of assuaging the sufferings of humanity. It has covered 
the globe with countless institutions of mercy, absolutely un- 
known to the whole pagan world." The early Christians took 
care of the poor and the helpless. In the Middle Ages we of- 
ten find a hospital connected with the church and the convent. 
But the later Roman monks made a virtue of begging rather 
than of labor. They increased the amount of poverty, when 
they deemed it meritorious, or encouraged hypocrisy. They 
created more wretchedness than they cured. The Protestants 
saw this fact, and gave another form to beneficence. If the 
hospital was separated from the house of worship, the infirm 
were aided by the worshipers. To Protestantism is largely due 
the asylums for special classes of sufferers, as the blind, the 
deaf and dumb, the idiotic, and the insane. To it also is due 
the fact that liberal education is no longer placed among the 
charities, but among the duties of parents, or guardians, and 
the rights of children. 

In the days of Luther began the age which exceeds all 
others, since the apostolic days, in the development of the 

45 



yo6 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

powers divinely given to the Christian Church. It has been the 
age of Biblical studies, theology, controversies, preaching, re- 
vivals, and the extension of Christianity. But the most won- 
derful progress has occurred during the last hundred years. 
The Presbyterian, of Philadelphia, offers this summary : "In the 
religious world the changes might, in many cases, be fairly 
termed revolutions. In the aggregate they mark a reformation. 
And if not for startling positions, and grand and heroic deeds, 
yet for vast and substantial results, this reformation rivals that 
of the sixteenth century. We group a few of these events, 
without regard to their chronological order. Foremost in time, 
and well-nigh in importance, is the rise and development of 
Methodism — ' a nation born at once.' We must read this as 
one of the grandest facts of Church history, and one telling 
especially upon the welfare of America. The rise and decay 
of Unitarianism in New England and Great Britain ; of Ration- 
alism in Germany, and the great advance all along the line of 
the Evangelical doctrine ; the formation of the Evangelical Alli- 
ance ; the secession of the Free Church of Scotland ; the reunion 
of broken branches of the Presbyterian Church ; the Federation 
of Presbyterians of all nations, recently consummated in Lon- 
don ; the disestablishment of the Irish Church ; the backward 
eddy of ritualism from the great current of the reformation ; 
and the forward movement of the Reformed Episcopal Church ; 
Infallibility brought to the birth, and almost at the same mo- 
ment the death of the Concordat; the Old Catholic uprising, 
and Rome's temporal power kenneled in the narrow space of 
one of her seven hills ; the rise and marvelous development of 
those mighty agencies for good, Bible and Tract Societies, and 
hundreds of kindred associations for practical benevolence ; the 
total abstinence reform; and the exaltation and utilizing of the 
lay element in the Church, consummated in such evangelistic 
labors as those of Moody and Sankey. Last, and perhaps 
greatest of all, the growth of the Sabbath-school, and the birth 
and maturity of foreign missions." 

The sixteenth century is especially marked by the develop- 
ment of theology ; the seventeenth by the settlement of Church 
polities and toleration ; the eighteenth by the revival of spir- 
itual life ; and the nineteenth by the apostolic spirit of missions. 
By these the universal Church is qualified to fulfill the commis- 



SPIRIT OF MISSIONS. 707 

sion of her Lord. " Probably the most powerful organizations 
in the Christian Church are those for missions to the heathen." 
They exist in nearly all denominations. They reach nearly - 
every nation under heaven. Their reports, journals, and pub- 
lications, in about two hundred languages, with versions of the 
Bible, and with cyclopaedias of missions, evince the activity of 
the press in the movement. There are about two hundred 
missionary and Bible societies in Protestant lands. Women 
are heartily enlisted in the work. Protestant nations, by com- 
merce, treaties, colonies, conquests, and national rule — as that 
of England over India, and recently over Syria — have secured 
more than toleration for Christian laborers. Little schools have 
grown into colleges in pagan lands ; native preachers increase ; 
native Churches promise to become national organizations — as 
in Japan and India — with members by thousands, and uncon- 
verted heathen are gradually adopting the manners, customs, 
laws, thought, and civilization of Christendom. The mission- 
aries, reckoned by thousands, have greatly contributed to 
peaceful diplomacy, science, general culture, and the reform of 
laws, as well as to the direct work of teaching and translating 
the Gospel, founding schools, churches, and hospitals, and 
opening new roads into paganism. So rapid have been these 
moral conquests that the statistics of this year will hardly serve 
for the next.* The great missionary organizations recognize 
each other, not as rivals, but as co-workers in a common broth- 
erhood. This comity has become a law, as well established as 
any law of nations. And distant co-workers of all denomina- 
tions, laying stress upon the essential truths of Christianity, 
send back their plea for the more spiritual and real unity 
of Christendom, which is one of the great problems of to-day, 
and would be one means of hastening the conversion of the 
world. The vast work is not peculiarly foreign, so long as 
every nominally Christian nation has in it a large element of 
unbelievers and intensely active agencies of infidelity. The 
children of pagan Africa were forcibly brought by thousands to 
America, enslaved, freed, and yet Christianized in a large 
degree. The sons of Japan and China come voluntarily, and 
the work of their conversion is now brought to American 
doors. This achievement might affect their native empires, 

* Notes I, V, VI. . 



708 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

and help to make Japan the Britain and China the France 
of the Asiatic continent. 

With the hope of more unity in faith and effort, with the 
Bible never before so popularly studied, with the laity never 
before so roused and so active, with the ordained ministry 
never more intent upon efficient labors, with methods never more 
carefully devised, with agencies never more wisely adapted to 
the purposes of world-wide evangelization, with successes at 
home never more cheering, with invitations never more urgent 
from foreign lands, with a spirit for missions every-where and 
wealth to sustain them, the Christian Church is qualified, as 
never before, speedily to fill the whole earth with the knowl- 
edge of her Lord, from whom comes the promise and the 
power of victory. 

"This Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the 
world, for a witness unto all nations. The Lord liveth, and 
the nations shall bless themselves in him, and in him shall 
they glory." 



NOTES. 

I. Religions of the World. The best and latest authorities give the 
whole population of the world as 1,439,145,300, and, as to religious distinc- 
tions, divide this number as follows, by populations : 

Roman Catholics, 270,000,000 

Greek Church, 90,000,000 

Protestants of all sects, . . . 132,000,000 

Jews, 7,000,000 

All others, 955,917,000 

Professor Schem estimates that, 1st, nearly one-half the population of 
the earth is under nominally Christian government ; 2d, nearly two-thirds 
of the area of the earth are under Christian governments ; and, 3d, nearly 
two-thirds of the Christian states (measured by populations) are Protestant. 

II. Leading Protestant Denominations, estimated thus: 
Baptists, Regular — In Great Britain, 276,000 members; in Canada, by 

population, 240,000; in the United States, 2,102,000 members. Free-will 
Baptists in United States, 76,000 members ; Seventh Day, 7,400 ; Church of 
God, 30,000; Anti-mission, 40,000; Campbellites, 350,000; German Tun- 
kers, 50,000 members. 

Congregaiio7ialists, or Independents — In Great Britain, 200,000 mem- 
bers ; in Canada, 22,000; in Australia, 11,000; in the United States, 366,000 
members, with 3,500 ministers. 



NOTES TO CHAPTER XXV. 709 

Episcopalians (Anglican) — In England and Wales, by population, about 
13,500,000; Scotland, 66,500 members; Ireland, 151,000 members; Canada, 
500,000 population ; Australia and New Zealand, 260,000 population ; United 
States, 3,300 clergy and 312,700 members; Mexico, 3 bishops and 70 con- 
gregations. Reformed Episcopalians, 15,000 members. Moravians, 14,200 
in the United States. 

Lutherans — In Germany about 26,500,000, by population, are Luther- 
ans and Calvinists, most of them in the United Church. The majority 
of the populations of Denmark, 2,000,000; Sweden, 4,500,000; Norway, 
1,850,000; Iceland, 72,000; and Greenland, 10,000, are nominally Lutheran. 
Lutheran populations, in Russia, 4,000,000; in Poland, 2,500,000; in Finland, 
350,000. Lutherans in Canada, 37,000 ; in the United States, 600,000, with 
2,500 ministers. 

Methodists — By membership in Great Britain, with their missions, Wes- 
leyans, 503,000; Primitive, 182,800; other bodies, 144,200. Wesleyans in 
Ireland, 27,700 ; in France, 2,000; Australia and New Zealand, with missions, 
66,500. In Canada, Methodist Church, 122,600; Methodist Episcopal Church, 
27,300; other branches, 18,000. In the United States, Methodist Episcopal 
Church, North, 1,688,800; South, 766,000; Evangelical Association, 105,000; 
United Brethren, 143,850; African, four branches, 520,550. Non-episcopal 
Methodists in the United States, five branches, 173,500 members. Total of 
Methodists in the United States, about 3,397,600. Grand total of Methodists, 
4,489,900 members ; 29,200 itinerant, and nearly 75,000 local, preachers. 

Presbyterians (in parts of Europe, The Reformed), estimated chiefly by 
ordained ministers — In Germany (not in the Established Church), about 50; 
Switzerland, 1,100; France; 650; Holland, 1,600; Belgium, 36; Italy, 66, 
chiefly Waldehsian ; Hungary, 2,020 ; Bohemia and Moravia, 70 ; Russia, 
40; Spain, 12; Norway, 3. In England, 260; Wales, 525, and 112,000 
members. In Scotland, Established, 1,400; United Presbyterian, 570: Free, 
1,100; other branches, 35. In Ireland, 650. In South Africa, 120; Aus- 
tralia, 260; New Zealand, no; elsewhere, 83. In Canada, Presbyterian 
Church, 720, and 98,490 members ; other bodies, about 100 ministers. In 
the United States, Presbyterian Church, North, 5,000; South, 1,200; United 
Presbyterian, 650; American Reformed, 550; German Reformed, 650; 
Cumberland, 1,400; other bodies, 320. Total of ministers, 21,350. 

Presbyterians in the United States, by membership — Presbyterian Church, 
North, 567,90c; South, 114,600; United Presbyterians, 78,100; American 
(Dutch) Reformed, 79,400; German Reformed, 87,900: Cumberland, 106,- 
300; Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, 9,200; Reformed, two bodies, 13,800; 
Associates, 6,000. Total, 1,063,200. 

III. Other Religious Bodies in the United States, estimated thus: 
Adventists, 25,000; Jews, 500,000; Mennonites, over 50,000; Quakers, 
orthodox, 100,000 ; Shakers, 6,000 ; Swedenborgians, 20,000 : Unitarians, 
33,000; Universalists, 60,000; Roman Catholics, by population, about 
6,000,000, with one cardinal, n archbishops, and 5,600 clergy. 

IV. Higher Education in the United States. Theological schools : 
Baptist, 15; Congregational, 8; Episcopal, 17; Lutheran, 14; Methodist 



7 10 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 

Episcopal, North, 7 ; South, 2; other Methodist, 3; Presbyterian, North, 13; 
South, 2; other Presbyterian, 8; Roman Catholic, 18; other bodies, 13. 
Total, 120, with about 560 professors, and, in 1878, 4,150 students. 

Colleges and universities, 356, classified as follows : Methodist, 52 ; 
Baptist, 37; Presbyterian, 22; Congregational, 15. Protestant Episcopal, 5; 
non-denominational, 81. 

V. Sunday-schools have become, especially in America, a part of 
Christian work within the Church; given rise to a special literature, and 
tended to more uniform methods of supervision and instruction. The course 
of Bible lessons, which begaa in 1872 to be international, is now used by 
more than 6,500,000 pupils in the United States; also used in Canada, 
England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, the Sandwich Islands, Norway, Swe- 
den, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Turkey, India, and China. 
"There are 77,793 Sunday-schools in the United States, having 853,100 
teachers and officers, and 6,504,054 scholars; total, 7,357,154. Only a little 
over one-third of the children between the ages of three and eighteen years 
are in Sunday-schools." 

" There are in the United States and British Provinces 933 Young Mens 
Christian Associations; in England and Wales, 216; in Scotland, 64; in 
Germany, 136; in France, 47; in Switzerland, 49. These societies exist in 
all the countries of Europe, as well as in Japan, China, and Africa." 

VI. Protestant Missions. The earliest permanent Protestant Socie- 
ties especially for missions were these : English Propagation Society, 1701 ; 
Danish, 1706-15; Scottish Propagation, 1709; Moravian, in Germany, 1732; 
Wesleyan, in England, 1769; Baptist, in England, 1792; London Society, 
1795; Scottish, at Edinburgh, and the Glasgow Society, 1796; Netherland, 
1797. Since the year 1800 there have been organized societies specially for 
(1) Home Missions, in the British Isles about twenty; in the United States, 
twenty-two, and several in other countries. (2) Foreign Missions, organized 
on the European Continent, at least thirty ; in England, seventeen ; Scot- 
land, five ; Ireland, four ; British Colonies, about ten ; in the United States, 
twenty-five. We may say fifty Home, and one hundred and five Foreign, 
Missionary Societies ; total, one hundred and fifty-five. These do not in- 
clude certain smaller denominations which have acted without special 
societies, nor the Bible and Tract Societies of various lands. 

Illustrations of Progress. (1) Nominally Christian Islands: the Sand- 
wich group, Madagascar, Fiji, Tonga, and other South Sea Islands. (2) 
Largely Protestant colonies which have promoted Christianity among the 
native peoples, as in South Africa, Liberia, Ceylon, Australia, and New 
Zealand. British India, with a population of nearly 250,000,000, is credited 
with a nominally Christian population of great and increasing influence ; 
and the membership of Protestant Missionary Churches seems to be over 
110,000; an ingathering by twenty-six Missionary Societies, in whose schools 
are about 140,000 pupils. One writer says, "The rising generation of Hin- 
doos has almost forgotten that suttee, Thuggism, female infanticide, and 
human sacrifice were once parts of their religion ; they begin to speak of 
them with scarcely less horror than we." (3) Mission Fields. As exam- 



NOTES TO CHAPTER XXV. 711 

pies : In China with probably 300,000,000 of people, there are more than ten 
American Societies represented, with 256 stations, 150 churches, and 5,300 
native members ; and fifteen European Societies, with 346 stations, 162 
churches, and 7,735 native members. In these there are nearly 600 na- 
tive preachers, and over 200 foreign ministers, with their wives, and lay- 
helpers. There are seven versions, or revisions, of the Bible in Chinese. 
" Forty years ago there were only three native Christians in all China, con- 
nected with Protestant missions ; to-day there are at least 14,000 and the 
number is rapidly increasing." Japan, with 34,000,000 of people, may yet 
become the Britain of Asia. In 1870 there were scarcely ten Protestant 
converts in Japan. Since then the missionary societies at work there have 
grown from three to at least seven, and by one of them a native National 
Church has been organized. There have been great successes in Siam, 
Syria, Persia, Turkey, and Africa. 

It is noticeable that 1st these vast movements come chiefly from the 
Germanic race, for to it belong the Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, and 
English-speaking peoples, who take the lead in foreign missions. 2d. Most 
of the work is done by English-speaking peoples, of whom there are about 
eighty-two millions dispersed over the globe, or one-eighteenth of the earth's 
population ; "next in aggression are the peoples who speak some dialect of 
the German language. 3d. There may be reason to say of the German, 
English, and American nations, " On the moral union of these three great 
nations, whose intellectual culture has already been united, depends, we 
believe, the future welfare of the world." 



INDEX. 




Abelard, 279, 285-7, 290-1. 

Acts, Plan of the, 6. 

Adoptionism, 226. 

jElfric, 240, 249. 

Agobard of Lyons, 226, 251. 

Aidan, 203-5. 

Alaric, 142-5. 

Alban, St., 186. 

Albertus Magnus, 294-5. 

Albigenses, 302-9. 

Alcuin, 178-80, 218. 

Aldhelm, 210. 

Alexander of Alexandria, 74, 

77, 79- 

of Hales, 293. 

Alexandria, schools of, 49-53, 

123. 
Alfred, King, 232-38. 
Alliance, Evangelical, 668, 695. 
Ambrose of Milan, 102, 107-10. 
American Colonies, 648-60. 

Churches, 665-710. 

Ammonius Saccus, 50. 
nabaptists, 399, 401-2, 416, 

423, 443. 475- 

Anatolius, no, 127. 

Andrews, Jedediah, 686. 

Andover, theological semina- 
ry, 694. 

Anglo-Catholics, 618. 

Anglo-Saxon Missions, 214-19. 

Anne, Queen of England, 611. 

Annihilationists, 701. 

Anselm of Bee, 279, 280-6; of 
Laon, 286. 

Anskar, 219-21. 

Antichrist, 254, 311, 344, 348. 

Antioch, Church of, 12; school 
of, 123. 

Antoninus Pius, 29. 

Apollinaris, 75. 

Apollinarianism, 75, 123-4. 

Apollonius of Tyana, 53. 

Apologists, 28, 32, 41, 54, 135, 

*43- 

Apostles, 4, 6-19. 
Apostles' Creed, 59, 112, 365. 
Apostolic Church, 6-20; Fa- 
thers, 20, 21. 
Aquinas, Thomas, 295-6. 



Arabic Science, 223-4,253. 
Arianism, 74-91, 97, 99, 101, 

644, 700. 
Arians, 124, 151, 156. 
Arius, 74-78, 82. 
Arminius, James, 440, 479, 481. 
Arminianism, 395, 449, 480-3; 

in England, 524. 
Arnaud, Henri, 597. 
Arnauld, Antoine, 490. 
Arnold of Brescia, 299-300, 306. 
Arnoldists, 300, 306. 
Arnulf of Rheims, 254. 
Articles, English, 516-17. 
Asbury, Francis, 696-8. 
Associate Presbyterians, 696, 

710. 
Astronomers, 550. 
Asylum, right of, 151, 169. 
Athanasius, 79-81. 
Athanasian Creed, 112. 
Athenagoras, 32, 50. 
Attila, 149. 
Augsburg Confession, 405 ; 

Peace of, 408, 460, 461. 
Augustine of Hippo, 131-5, 143. 
Augustinianism, 134, 137, 227, 

282, 290, 334, 335, 384, 489, 

490. 
Augustine,,missionary, 198-201. 
Aurelius, Marcus, 30, 35, 37. 

Bacon, Francis, 297; Roger, 
296-7. 

Baillie, Robert, 505. 

Bale, John.. 339, 533. 

Baptism, 48; infant, 48, 73. 

Baptists in Britain, 553-5, 622-3, 
645; in America, 654,677-9, 
708; Seventh-day, 679. 

Barnes, Albert, 691-2. 

Bartholomew, the St. in Eng- 
land, 580-1 ; in France, 
470-1. 

Basil of Csesarea, 91-6. 

Basilias, the, 94. 

Basle reformed, 425. 

Baxter, Richard, 547, 580. 

Bee, convent of, 244, 280, 284. 

Becket, Thomas a, 316-17. 



Bede, Venerable, 211. 

Bedell, William, 536-7. 

Belgic Confession, 476. 

Benedict Biscop, 209. 

Benedict of Nursia, 157-61. 

Benedictines, the, 158-61, 164, 
239-40, 491. 

Bengel, J. A., 600. 

Berengar of Tours, 229. 

Bernard, St., 278,287-91, 304. 

Berthold, friar, 357. 

Beza, Theodore, 457-9, 461, 
466, 479. 

Bible Readers, 313-15. 

Bible, versions of, 309, 315 ; 
forbidden, 309, 315 ; Eng- 
lish, 210-n, 240, 328, 343, 
510,514, 538; Irish, 533-6. 

Bible Societies, 603, 614; Brit- 
ish, 623 ; American (A. D. 
1816). 

Biddle, John, 615.' 

Bilney, Thomas, 509, 511. 

Black Death, the, 335, 347, 358, 
375- 

Blair, Robert, 535. 

Boethius, 156, 236. 

Bogomiles, 332. 

Bonaventura, 294. 

Boniface, missionary, 214-19; 
VIII, pope, 329. 

Bons Hommes, 304-6. 

Book of Sports, 529-30. 

Borgias, the, 370. 

Borromeo, Charles, 484. 

Bossuet, 494. 

Bradwardine, Thomas, 334. 

Brethren of the Common Life, 
356-61. 

Britain, Early Church of, 36, 
67, 150, 186-8. 

Brousson, Claude, 589. 

Brownists, the, 525-7. 

Bullinger, Henry, 424-5. 

Bunyan, John, 561, 580, 622. 

Burnet, Bishop, 613. 

Butler, Bishop, 615. 

Caedmon, poet, 200-10. 
Caesarea, school of, 54, 56. 
713 



7H 



INDEX. 



Calas, Jean, 591. 

Calixtus, George, 598-9. 

Calvin, John, 406, 428-34, 441- 
57; Institutes of, 400, 431. 

Calvinism, Five Points of, 481; 
in Germany, 407, 417, 462-3 

Cambridge, 509 ; Platonists, 
610. 

Cameronians, 633. 

Camissards, 589. 

Campbellites, 629. 

Canada, Churches of, 703-4. 

Canon Law, 292. 

Canon of New Testament, 58. 

Canterbury founded, 199. 

Canute, King, 240-43. 

Capet, Hugh, 254. 

Cardinals organized, 262. 

Carlstadt, Dr., 390,400, 402. 

Carolinas, the, 659-60. 

Carson, Alexander, 645. 

Carthage, 46-48. 

Carthusians, 164. 

Cartwright, Thomas, 524. 

Cassiodorus, 157. 

Catacombs, 33, 41. 

Cathari, 332. 

Celibacy, clerical, 237-40, 247, 
258-9, 282, 317. 

Celsus, 31. 

Celtic Missions, 185-97. 

Chalcedon, council of, 128. 

Chalmers, Thomas, 640-3. 

Chalons, battle of, 149. 

Chandieu, Antony, 465. 

Channing, W. E., 700. 

Charity, 47, 94, 98, 163, 316, 705. 

Charlemagne, 172-82, 218. 

Charles Martel, 170-72, 215. 

Charles I of England, 504-6, 
529-32, 541, 569. 

Charles II of England, 568, 
572-3. 576, 582, 585, 597, 632. 

Charles V, Emperor, 392-3, 398, 
407-8. 

Charles IX of France, 469-72. 

Chaucer, 328. 

China, missions in, 707, 711. 

Chivalry, 277. 

Chorepiscopos, 96, 97. 

Christ Jesus, ministry of, 3. 

Christian Life, 704-5. 

Christianity, origin of, 1-2; 
preparation for, 2 ; legal- 
ized, 59 ; a civilizing power, 
14, 24, 94, no, 140, 142, 151, 
152, 160, 167, 176, 177, 208, 
216, 250, 318, 704-1 1. 

Christological controversies, 
114-23. 

Chrysostom, John, 102, 118-23. 

Church defined, 7; buildings, 
54, 55, 63, 247, 251 ; a civ- 
ilizer (see Civilization) ; 



moral decline of, 63, 70, 72, 
106, 118, 140, 151, 572-4. 

Churchmen, Low, High, 
Broad, 617-19, 666-8. 

Cistercians, 164, 288. 

Civilization by the Church, 14, 
24, 94, no, 140, 142, 151, 152, 
160, 167, 176, 177, 208, 216, 
250, 3*8, 704-ir. 

Clairvaux, 288. 

Clarke, Adam, 630; Samuel, 
615. 

Claudius of Turin, 225-6. 

Clement of Alexandria, 50, 52 ; 
of Rome, 21 ; the Scot, 179, 
213. 

Clergy, influence of, 109, 151, 
230; English, 613; Scot- 
tish, 500, 575. 

Clotilda, 166. 

Clovis, 154, 166-9. 

Cluny, order of, 164. 

Cobham, Lord, 344-6. 

Coke, Thomas, 630, 697. 

Colet, John, 379-82. 

.Coligny, Admiral, 465, 472. 

Colman, the Culdee, 205-6. 

Columba, 191-5. 

Columban, 195-7. 

Columbus, Christopher, 372. 

Commodus, Emperor, 38. 

Communism, 357-8. 

Conference, Methodist Epis- 
copal, 629, 697. 

Congregationalism in United 
States, 669-77. 

Connecticut, 655-7. 

Continuity of Churches, 394-6. 

Consistory, Genevan, 449; Lu- 
theran, 404. 

Constance, council of, 352-5. 

Constantine, 67-72, 76-83. 

Constantinople founded, 71 ; 
fall of, 363, 374. 

Constantius, 62, 67, 83-6. 

Consubstantiation, 401, 426. 

Councils General, 114-5 ; Nice, 
76-8; Constantinople, 100: 
Ephesus, 125-6; Chalce- 
don, 128; Reforming, 354- 
6; Constance, 352-5; Prot- 
estant, 481, 675-7, 695; 
Trent, 483. 

Court, Antoine, 590-T. 

Covenant, Scottish, National, 
505, 635-6. 

Covenanters, 542, 545, 551, 563, 
566, 571-4, 632-3. 

Coverdale, Miles, 526. 

Cranmer, Thomas,, 512-19. 

Creeds, ancient, 112. 

Crell, Nicolas, 462. 

Crisp, Tobias, 621-2. 

Criticism, German, 601. 



Cromwell, Oliver, 547-78, 596; 

Richard, 578-9 ; Thomas, 

512-15. 
Cross, sign of, 73. 
Crusades, 273-8, 298. 
Cudworth, R., 610. 
Culdees, 191-5, 203-7, 231, 249, 

318. 
Cur Deus Homo, 283, 364. 
Cuthbert, 204. 
Cyprian, 46-9, 57. 
Cyran, St., 490. 
Cyril of Alexandria, 125-7, 148; 

missionary, 221. 

D'Albret, Jeanne, 466-9. 

Damasus, 89. 

Damian, Peter, 258. 

Danes, ravages of, 230. 

Dante, 362. 

Davies, Samuel, 661. 

Decius, Emperor, 47, 56-7. 

Decretals, false, 175, 184. 

Deism, English, 601-2, 614-16. 

Denmark, missions in; 219-21. 

Dickinson, Jonathan, 661, 687. 

Didymus, 85. 

Diocletian, 62-7. 

Diodati, John, 459. 

Dionysius of Alexandria, 60-1 ; 

of Corinth, 33. 
Dioscurus, 127-8. 
Disciplina Arcani, 73. 
Dissent from Rome, 301-72. 
Dissenters, English, 581, 609- 

12. 
Divine Right, 525, 549. 
Docetism, 19. 
Dollinger, J. J., 607. 
Dominic, St., 293, 307, 309. 
Dominicans, 293-8, 324, 378 
Domitian, 19. 
Donatists, 66, 72, 133-5. 
Dort, synod of, 481. 
Drogheda, storming of, 568. 
Duff, Alexander, 639, 642. 
Duns Scotus, 296. 
Dunstan, 238-40. 
Dutch Reformed Church, 682- 

3, 7°9- 
Dynamists, 59, 114. 

Easter question, 78, 200. 

Ebbo, 219. 

Ebionism, 19. 

Eckart, 357. 

Edessa, school of, 126. 

Edict of Nantes, 473, 584. 

Edward I of England, 327; 

111,328,334, 337; VI, 516- 

17, 533- 
Edwards, Jonathan, 670-2; 

Thomas, 556. 
Edwin of Deira, 201, 203. 



INDEX. 



715 



Egbert, King, 232. 
Elagabalus, 54. 
Eligius of Noyon, 213-14. 
Eliot, John, missionary, 656. 
Elizabeth of England, 469, 

472-3. 478, 520-2. 
Emperors, for three centuries, 

22. 
Empire, Holy Roman, 165. 
England, Church of, 198-212, 

231-40, 245-9, 316-29, 335- 

47, 508-32, 540, 612-19. 
English missions, 214-19. 
English Bible, 210-11, 240,328, 

343. 5io. 5i4, 538. 
Ephesus, councils of, 125, 

127. 
Ephraem Syrus, 95. 
Epiphanius, 116, 121. 
Episcopacy, 97. 
Episcopal Church in America, 

665-9. 
Episcopius, Simon, 481-3. 
Erasmus, 380-82, 425-6. 
Erastians, 582. 
Erskine, John, 639; R. and E., 

627, 637. 
Ethelbert of Kent, 198-9. 
Eucharistic controversies, 228- 

30, 401, 422, 426, 457. 
Eusebius of Csesarea, 75-8; of 

Nicomedia, 75, 78, 81. 
Eutychianism, 126-8, 137. 

Farel, Willtam, 429, 434-45, 

457- 
Felicissimus, schism of, 47. 
Fenelon, 589. 
Ferrer, Vincent, 374. 
Filioque, 138, 224. 
Fislc, Wilbur, 698. 
Fitzralph, Richard, 320, 337. 
Form of Concord, 417. 
France, Protestantism in, 464- 

8, 584, 588-92, 594. 
Francis I of France, 428-30. 
Franciscans, 292-8, 324. 
Francke, A. H., 599. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 661. 
Franks, the, 166-84. 
Frederick II, the Great, 601. 
Frederick William III, 604-5. 
Frederick the Wise, 382, 392. 
Free Church of Scotland, 

640-43. 
Friars, 292-3, 324-6, 336. 
Fulda, 217. 
Fulgentius, 135. 

Galerius, 62-8 
Gallican liberties, 228, 255. 
Gallienus, Emperor, 59. 
Gallus, missionary, 197. 
Geddes, Jenny, 505. 



Geneva, Reformation at, 437, 
ff ; Rationalism and Revi- 
val at, 595. 

Genseric, 149. 

Gerbert, Pope, 253-7. 

Gerhard Groot, 359. 

George of Cappodocia, 86. 

George I of England, 611. 

Georgia, 660. 

Germanic Peoples, 140, 711. 

Germany, conversion of, 214- 
19; empire, 165, 252-70, 
539,603; Protestantism in, 
359-400, 460. 

German Reformed Church, 
460-63 ; in America, 683, 709. 

Gerson, Jean, 353-6. 

Ghibeline, 329. 

Gladiatorial combats, 142. 

Gnosticism, 39-40. 

Godfrey of Bouillon, 270, 275-6. 

Gomar, Francis, 480. 

Gothic Bible, 141. 

Goths, 141, 157. 

Gottschalk, 327. 

Gratian, Emperor, 99, 103; 
monk, 292. 

Greek Church, 128, 138, 277. 

Greek nature, 118. 

Green, Ashbel, 690. 

Gregory I, Pope, 158, 161-3 ; 
VII, 259-70. 

Gregory of Nazianzen, 91-3, 
100-1 ; of Nyssa, 91 ; of 
Utrecht, 217-18. 

Grisons, the, 416. 

Grossetete, Robert, 324-9. 

Guelph, 153, 329. 

Guiscard, Robert, 261, 269, 271. 

Guises, the, 467-70, 472, 502. 

Gustavus Adolphus, 539; Vasa, 
410-n. 

Hadrian, Emperor, 28; Pope, 

IV, 300, 319; VI, 403. 
Haldane, J. and R., 595, 622, 

639- 
Half-way Covenant, 670-2. 
Hamilton, Patrick, 406. 
Hampton Court conference, 

527- 
Harding, Stephen, 287-8. 
Harvard College, 653, 674. 
Heidelberg, 377; Catechism, 

460-1, 683. 
Hellenists, 2, 8-12. 
Helvetic Confessions, 428, 461, 

476. 
Henderson, Alexander, 505, 

S40-2, 556. 
Henricians, 303. 
Henry I of England, 281-2 ; IT, 

316-20; III, 327; VIII, 

508-16, 533. 



Henry IV, Emperor, 263-70 
Henry IV of France, 468-75. 
Heresies, 34, 39, 114-16; death 

for, 101-3; burning for, 

305- 
Hierocles, 53-4. 
Hilary of Aries, 148; of 

Poitiers, 89. 
Hildebert of Tours, 279. 
Hildebrand, Pope, 259, 70. 
Hincmar of Rheims, 227. 
Hippolytus, 39. 
Historians of ancient Church, 

112. 
Hobart, Bishop, 667. 
Holland, Churches of, 475-83, 

608. 
Homoousios, 75-78. 
Honorius I, Pope, 137. 
Hooker, Richard, 524-7. 
Hooper, John, 522. 
Hospitals, 94, 95, 705. 
Huguenots, 464-8, 584-5, 588- 

92, 681, 683. 
Hume, David, 615, 638. 
Hungary, 221, 585, 608, 709. 
Huntingdon, Lady, 630. 
Huss, John, 346-54. 
Hutten, Ulric, 379, 398. 
Hymnology, no, 255. 
Hypatia, 125. 

Iceland, 243. 

Iconoclasm, 225, 422-6, 476. 

Ignatius of Antioch, 20, 27. 

Image worship, 224. 

Independents in Britain, 527, 
552, 557, 562, 610, 621, 645, 
708. 

India, Missions, 485-7, 707, 710. 

Indulgences, 271/388, 420. 

Infallibility, papal, 131, 137, 
268, 606. 

Innocent I of Rome, 143, 147; 
HI, 307, 310, 314, 322-3. 

Inquisition, the, 305-9, 374,414, 
476, 487. 

Inspiration of Scripture, 113, 
226. 

Interdict, papal, 306. 

Interims, the, 406-7. 

Interpretation of Scripture, 51, 
119, 380-2. 

Investitures, 252, 280-6. 

Iona, 191-4, 203-6. 

Ireland, Church of, 189-92, 
I0 5> 2 3 x > 3 T 7-2o; Protest- 
antism in, 532-7, 567-71, 

643-5, 7°9- 
Irenseus of Lyons, 36-S. 
Irish Massacre, 536-7. 
Irving, Edward, 620, 646. 
Italy, Protestantism in, 414-16, 

607. 



yi6 



INDEX. 



James I of England, 404, 427- 
9 ; II, 581, 585-7, 633. 

Janizaries, the, 332. 

Jansen, Cornelius, 489. 

Jansenists, the, 489-95. 

Japan, missions in, 683, 711. 

Jerome, 102, 111, 117, 130; of 
Prague, 350, 352-4, 

Jerusalem, 18, 271, 274-6. 

Jesuits, the, 165, 472-4, 484-9, 
522, 585, 607. 

Joachim, Abbot, 295, 299. 

Joan of Arc, 333. 

John, Apostle, 8, 18, 19; of 
Damascus, 225, 279; King 
of England, 320-3; of 
Gaunt, 339-44; of Salis- 
bury, 291, 319. 

Jovian, 88-9. 

Judaizers, 16. 

Julian, Emperor, 86-8 ; of 
Eclanum, 131. 

Julius, Bishop of Rome, 146. 

Jury, trial by, 237. 

Justinian, 165. 

Justin Martyr, 34-6. 

Kenrick, Archbishop, 703. 
Knox, John, 471, 495, 497 ff, 
5i7- 

Lactantius, 65. 
Laidlie, Dr., 682. 
Lanfranc, 230, 244-7, 249, 280. 
Langton, Stephen, 321-4. 
Lapsed, the, 46, 37. 
Lasco, John a, 412. 
Latimer, Hugh, 510-19. 
Latin, use of in Church, 208, 

222, 373. 
Laud, William, 504, 530-32. 
League, the papal, 472. 
Le Fevre, Jacques, 429, 
Legates, papal, 317. 
Leibnitz, 599, 612. 
Leighton, Alexander, 531; 

Robert, 632. 
Leipsic University, 351. 
Liberty, progress of, 609-12 

(see Toleration). 
Leo I, Bishop of Rome, 127-8, 

148, 151-2 ; IX, 258-62 ; X, 

364-6, 374. 
Leonardi da Vinci, 364. 
Letters of Obscure Men, 379. 
Libanius, 86, 105, 119. 
Liberius, 89, 91. 
Literature, early English, 236; 

240; German, 219. 
Liturgies, 108, in. 
Livingstone, John, 535-6, 577, 

682. 
Loci Communes, 400. 
Locke, John, 609, 614. 



Logos, the, 59-61. 
Lollards, the, 333, 344, 374. 
Lombards, the, 163, 175. 
Louis the Pious, 182, 
Louis XII, 374; XIV, 474, 

583-7. 
Loyola, Ignatius, 452, 484, 542, 
Lucaris, Cyril, 486. 
Lucian, poet, 31 : of Antioch, 

75- 
Lull, Raymund, 222. 
Lupus of Troyes, 149. 
Luther, Martin, 359-60, 372, 

383, 406, 601. 
Lutheranism in Europe, 397- 

417 ; in America, 650, 681, 

709. 
Lyons, persecution at, 36. 
Lyra, Nicolas, 299. 

Macedonia's, 84. 
M'Cosh, James, 642, 695. 
Machiavelli, 365. 
Mackemie, Francis, 684-6. 
Magna Cliarta, 323. 
Malachy, St., 318. 
Manicheism, 40, 131, 134, 
Marcus Aurelius, 30-7. 
Margaret of Navarre, 429; of 

Scotland, 248-9. 
Marrow of modern divinity, 

637- 
Martin of Tours, 102, 105. 
Mariolatry, 259, 277, 294, 296. 
Marot, Clement, 433, 451, 476. 
Mary, Virgin, 124, 259 ; of 

England, 517-19; of Scots, 

502. 
Maryland, 649-50, 
Mason, J. M., 696. 
Mass, the, 340, 345, 422. 
Mather, Cotton, 657. 
Matilda, Countess, 265-8. 
Matthew, Father, 645. 
Matthias of Janow, 349. 
Maximin, Emperor, 56. 
Medici, the, 364, 366, 368 ; 

Catherine de, 467-73. 
Melancthon, 391, 400, 404-8, 

4*7, 43o, 460- 
Meletians, the, 73. 
Melville, Andrew, 503. 
Mennonites, the, 416, 679, 709. 
Mercersburg theology, 683. 
Methodius, missionary, 221. 
Methodism in Britain, 616-31 ; 

in America, 629, 696-9, 703, 

709; in France, 594. 
Metz, Bible Readers of, 313- 

15- 
Middle Ages, 165,211,223, 230, 

236. 
Milicz, John, 348. 
Millenarians, 61. 250, 461. 



Milton, John, 547, 549, 557, 567, 

568, 579. 
Ministries, the three, 3-5, 71-2, 

373. 
Miracles, continuance of, 61, 

_ 615. 
Missions, mediaeval, 185-223 ; 

Jesuit, 485-8; Protestant, 

452, 487, 614, 620, 623, 630, 

706-8, 710. 
Modalists, 60, 114. 
Moderatism, 638-9. 
Mohammed. 170-71. 
Molinists, the, 488. 
Monarchians, 59, 114. 
Monasticism, 93, 94, 96, 111, 

157 ; in Europe, 157, 164. 
Monk, George, 579. 
Monophysites, 115, 137, 138. 
Monothelites, 137-8. 
Montanists, 32, 45. 
Montfort, Simon, 308, 324, 327. 
Moravians, 354, 600, 603, 625, 

669,709. 
More, Sir Thomas, 380, 514. 
Mornay, Philip de, 473. 
Mortmain, 328. 

Mysticism, 291, 294, 357-61, 494. 
Mystics, the, 291, 494. 

Nantes, Edict of, 573, 584. 

Napoleon I, 593, 597, 603; II, 
594- 

Neff, Felix, 598. 

Neoplatonism, 49-51. 

Nero, 17, 18. 

Nestoriamsm, 124-6, 223. 

Netherlands, Reform in the, 
475-83- 

New England Colonies, 651-9; 
Churches, 669-77. 

New Haven, 655-6. 

New York, 649. 

Newman, J. H., 618. 

Nice, Council of, 76-8; Creed, 
77- 

Nominalism, 286, 299. 

Non-jurors, the, 609, 634. 

Norman Conquest, 243-9. 

Northmen, 182-3, 2 3°- 2 > 2 43 » 
in Britain, 230-4; in Ire- 
land, 317; in France, 243; 
In Italy, 261 

Norway, conversion 0^241-43. 

Novatians, 47, 101. 

Oak, Synod of the, 121. 
Occam, William, 298. 
Ochino, Bernard, 450. 
Odoacer, 153 
OZcolampadius, 425. 
Olaf, St., 242. 
Oldcastle, Sir John, 344-6. 
Old Catholics, 606-7. 



INDEX. 



717 



Ordeals, 228, 253, 257, 267, 271. 

Origen, 49-58, 116. 

Ostrogoths, 154, 

Oswald of North umbria, 203-5. 

Oswy, King, 205-6. 

Otho I, Emperor, 253 ; III, 

253-6. 
Owen, John, 57. 
Oxford, 291, 338, 341, 344, 379, 

509, 618. 

Paganism, 13; downfall of, 
62-72, 90, 103-6; influence 
of, on the Church. 106. 

Palatinate, the, 460-62, 538-9, 
587, 612. 

Paleario, Aonio, 415. 

Palladius, 188. 

Pantaenus, 50. 

Papacy, the, 48, 145, 146-52, 
174-5, 184, 247, 251-64, 269- 
70, 329-32, 337-3, 343, 355, 
374, 606-7. 

Papal schism, 330-2, 

Paris, University of, 179, 183, 
291.. 429. 

Parliament, Long, 532, 576. 

Pascal, Blaise, 491, 493, 

Patriarchates, the five, 97. 

Patrick, St., 188-91. 

Paul, 9, 11-18; of Samosata, 59. 

Paulicians, 332. 

Paulinus of Nola, 145, 164, 
202-3, 

Peasant Wars, 373-5. 

Pecoke, Reginald, 346. 

Pelagianism, 124, 129, 131. 

Pelagius, 129, 131, 143. 

Penn, William, 657-9. 

Pennsylvania, 657-9. 

Penry, John, 525-6. 

Persia, Christianity in, 98, 163. 

Persecutions, early, 8-17, 20, 
22, 25, 31, 37, 44, 52, 56, 64- 
8, 84, 91, 98 ; causes of, 21, 
64, 81, 99; number of, 22; 
effects of, 22, 44, 72, 135; 
by Churchmen, 101-3. 

Pestalozzi, 603. 

Peter, Apostle, 8, 10, 16; Can- 
tor, 299, 305 ; Hermit, 274- 
5; Lombard, 292; the 
Venerable, 289, 291; Wal- 
do, 309-12. 

Petrobrussians, 302. 

Philip the Evangelist, 10; the 
Arabian, 56 ; I of France, 
263; IV of France, 33; of 
Hesse, 427; II of Spain, 
414, 467, 469, 475. 

Philosophy, 49-51, 88, 104, 107, 
227, 278-9, 601. 

Photius, 138. 



Pico, John, 365-8. 
Pietism, German, 599, 625. 
Pilgrim Fathers, 529, 651. 
Pilgrimages, 82, 270. 
Pipin of Heristal, 169-70. 
Pius IX, Pope, 606. 
Plato, 51. 
Pliny, 13, 23-5. 
Plotinus, 50-53. 
Plymouth Brethren, 646-7. 
Poitiers, battle of, 169. 
Polycarp, 20, 29. 
Poor-men of Lyons, 310. 
Populations, present, 645, 664, 

708. 
Porphyry, 50. 
Port Royal, 491-4. 
Potbinus, 37. 
Praemunire, 328. 
Prague, University of, 347-51. 
Preaching, 4, 39, 54, 73, 118, 

148, 164, 180, 213, 239-40, 

288, 321, 325. 
Predestinarian controversy, 

227. 
Prelacy, growth, 47-8, 63, 97. 
Presbyter, 5, 15. 
Presbytery restored, 421, 436, 

446, 449. 
Presbyterianism in America, 

681-96, 709; in Canada, 

704; in England, 524, 526, 

561-7, 578, 610, 619-20, 709; 

in Ireland, 537, 570, 643-5. 
Prester John, 126. 
Princeton College, 661. 
Printing, art of, 363-5, 375. 
Priscillian, 102. 
Progress in Middle Ages, 223; 

of civilization, 704-7, 710. 
Propaganda, the, 488. 
Protestantism, 376, ff; types 

of, 395 ; unity of, 394, 427, 

446, 451, 463; continuity, 

396. 
Prussia, 221, 463, 599, 604-5; 

Established Church of, 

604-5, 7°9- 
Psalmody, 422, 451, 476. 
Pullen, Robert, 291. 
Puritans, 508, 521-30, 546, 651-7. 
Puseyism, 618. 
Pym, John, 540-7. 

Quadratus, 28. 
Quakers, 646, 701, 709. 
Quesnel, Pasquier, 494-5. 
Quietists, the, 494. 

Rabanus, Maurus, 227-9. 
Rabaut, Paul, 591-3. 
Radbert, Paschasius, 183, 228, 
246. 



Radbod, 214. 

Raikes, Robert, 617. 

Ramus, Peter, 466, 471, 479. 

Rationalism, Mediaeval, 285; 
English, 614-19; German, 
599-603. 

Ratram, 229, 249. 

Raymond, Palmaris, 316; of 
Sabunde, 299; of Tou- 
louse, 308. 

Realism, 299. 

Recared, King, 146, 162. 

Reformation, the, in Bohemia, 
411 ; Denmark, 410 ; Eng- 
land, 508-82, 540-67, 575- 
82 ; France, 428-34, 464-75, 
484-95; Holland, 475-83; 
Hungary, 411-12; Ireland, 
532-7, 567-71, 643-5; Italy, 
414-16 ; Poland, 412 ; Prus- 
sia, 409 ; Scotland, 495- 
508, S4o-3, 571-6, 631-45; 
Spain, 413-14; Sweden, 
410-11. 

Reformed Episcopal Church, 
668-9. 

Reformers, circles of, 375-397. 

Reforms, Mediaeval, 250-60; 
on four bases, 334-372 ; in 
Roman Church, 483-95. 

Remi, Bishop, 167. 

Renaissance, the, 361-72. 

Renee, Madame, 415, 433, 465. 

Restorationists, 701. 

Reuchlin, John, 378-80. 

Revivals, modern, 535-6, 596, 
616, 623-7, 638, 670, 678-81, 
687-9, 690. 

Revolution, French, 588, 592-3. 

Rhode Island, 653-4. 

Richard I of England, 320. 

Richelieu, Cardinal, 474, 539. 

Ridley, Bishop, 516, 518, 523. 

Rimini, Council of, 84. 

Ritualism, 63, 530, 618. 

Robber Synod, 127. 

Robert the Pious, 255. 

Robertson, William, 638-9. 

Robinson, John, 529. 

Roman Catholics in America, 
648, 663, 702-3, 709; in 
England, 586-9, 618; in 
Germany, 539, 605-7 : * n 
Ireland, 533~7, 568-7, 586- 
8, 645; in Italy, 607; in 
Scotland, 563, 634 ; in 
Spain, 608; in the world, 
708-10. 

Roman bishops, 39, 48, 89; 
Empire, fall of, 138, 139, 
153, 363-74- 

Roses, wars of the, 346. 

Rous's Psalms, 560, 685. 



7 i8 



INDEX. 



Rupert, missionary, 212. 
Russia, conversion of, 221 

Churches of 608,. 
Rutherford, Samuel, 558. 
Ryswick, Peace of, 588. 

Sabbath- schools, 608, 617. 

697, 710. 
Sabellius, 60. 
Sacheverel, Dr., 613. 
Sacraments, the seven, 299. 
Saint Bartholomew massacre, 
470-1. 

Sales, Francis de, 484. 

Salvian, 146. 

Salzburg, 212. 

Salzburgers, the, 606, 681. 

Savonarola, 334, 366-72. 

Savoy Confession, 621. 

Saxons in England, 187, 198. 

Schisms, 47, 72, 73. 

Schleiermacher, F., 359, 602, 
604. 

Scholasticism, 278-98. 

Schools of Alexandria, 49-53, 
123; of Antioch, 123; of 
Csesarea, 54, 56; of Charle- 
magne, 178-9; of Scotland, 
507- 

Scotland, Church in, 188, 192- 
4, 248-9 ; Reformation in, 
495-508, 540-3, 57i-6, 631- 
45 ; Churches of, 631-43. 

Scotus, Duns, 296; John, 226-9. 

Sects, Mediaeval, 301-2, 322. 

Semi-Arians, 78, 84, 91. 

Semi-Pelagians, 135-7, 296. 

Separatists, 528-9, 651. 

Serapis, 14, 104. 

Servetus, 432, 455-6. 

Severinus, 165. 

Severus, Alexander, 54-5 ; Sep- 
timius, 51-2. 

Simony, 251, 257, 258, 261, 264. 

Slavery mitigated, 70: in 
America, 649, 690, 694, 699. 

Smectymnuus, 549. 

Socinians in Poland, 413, 454; 
in England, 615, 621, 

Solemn League and Covenant, 
54°"8, 552, 55 6 > 559, 5 6 4. 568, 
570, 57i-4, 633-6. 

Spain, Church in, 146, 162, 
171 -2, 374, 413-14, 608. 

Spener, Philip J., 599, 625. 

Spurgeon, C. H., 623. 

Stephen, Evangelist, 9. 

Staupitz, John, 360, 382, 394. 

Stilicho, 142-3. 

Stylites, 155. 

Subscription to creeds, 112, 
616, 620-1, 638, 644, 686-7, 
692. 



Sumptuary Laws, 369, 441. 
Sunday-schools, 608, 617, 697, 

710. 
Supererogation, 271. 
Supralapsarianism, 480. 
Sweden, missions in, 219-21; 

Reformation in, 410, 486. 
Switzerland, Reformation in, 

419-64, 595, 709. 
Symeon of Jerusalem, 19; the 

Stylite, 155. 
Synesius, 106-7. 

Tauler, John, 358-9, 
Taylor, Jeremy, 547; N. W., 

675 ; Rowland, 518. 
Templars in France, 277, 330. 
Tennent, Gilbert, 687-9. 
Tertullian, 42, 46. 
Tetzel, John, 388. 
Theodore of Canterbury, 208. 
Theodoret, 112, 126, 127. 
Theodoric the Goth, 154-6. 
Theodosius, Emperor, 99-no, 

119. ^ 
Theologia Germanica, 359. 
Theological Seminaries, 621, 

643, 674, 678, 681, 683, 690, 

696, 700, 709- to. 
Theology, scientific, 113, 118, 

164, 227, 278-80, 283, 292-6, 

365, 400, 408, 431, 459, 601, 

612; Jesuit, 488. 
Thirty Years' War, 408, 474, 

538-9, 595- 
Thomas Aquinas, 295-6. 
Three ministries, the, 3-5, 71- 

2, 373- 
Thundering Legion, 37. 
Toleration, 44, 59, 99, 103, 156, 

454-5, 463, 469, 473, 479, 

480, 4S2-3, 523-5, 529. 538, 
552-9, 566, 578-81, 591-2, 

598, 609-12, 634, 644, 651, 

664. 
Tovirs, battle of, 172. 
Tractarianism, 618, 668. 
Traditores, 66. 
Trajan, Emperor, 23, 27 
Transubstantiation, 228, 230 

240, 272, 279, 3°3, 305 
Travers, Walter, 526-7. 
Trent, Council of 483. 
Triers, Cromwell's, 577. 
Trinity, 59, 60, 74. 
Trivium, the, 178. 
Truce of God, 250. 
Tuckney, Anthony, 561, 564. 
Tulchan bishops, 496, 501. 
Turks in Europe, 331, 363. 
Turretine, Francis, 460; J. A., 

595- 
Tyndale, William, 510. 



Ulfilas, 141, 154. 
Ulster, Plantation of, 533. 
Unitarians, 59, 60, 413, 615, 621, 

672-4, 700, 709. 
Unitas Fratrum, 354. 
United Brethren, 354, 600. 
United Presbyterians, 636, 643, 

696. 
United States of America, 660- 

4; the Churches of, 665- 

710. 
Unity of Protestants, 394, 427, 

446, 451, 463, 707. 
Universalists, 673, 700, 709. 
Universities, rise of, 363, 375, 

495- 
Urban II, Pope, 274; VI, 331. 
Ussher, James, 534-6, 560. 

Valdes, Juan, 414. 

Valens, Emperor, 90, 91, 93, 
99, 141. 

Valentian I, 89, 91. 

Valerian, Emperor, 49, 57. 

Valla Laurentius, 365. 

Vandals, the, 134-5. 

Victor, Hugh St., 291; Em- 
manuel, 598. 

Vincent of Lerius, 123. 

Virgil of Salzburg, 212. 

Virginia, 649, 662. 

Visigoths, 146. 

Voltaire, 592. 

Vulgate, the Latin, 117. 



Waldenses, 311- 13, 453, 595-8. 
Waldo, Peter, 309-12. 
Waldhauser, Conrad, 347. 
Wales, Church in, 187, 200-1, 

526, 580, 623, 631, 709. 
Wandsworth, order of, 526. 
Wayland, Francis, 678. 
Wentworth, Thomas, 530, 534. 
Wenzel, King, 351-2. 
Wesley, John, 616, 624-30, 696. 
Wessel, John, 360, 377. 
Wessex, 204-5. 

Westminster Assembly, 541, 

_/ 543, 549, 559-6i, 581 ; Con- 

, ^f r fession, 560, 571, 652, 656, 

657, 676, 686. 
Whitby, Synod of, 206. 
White, William, 666. 
Whitefield, George, 625-7, 638 

660, 688. 
Whifgift, John, 524-6. 
Wiclif (see Wyclif ). 
Wilfrid, 205-9. 
Willigis, Archbishop, 256-7. 
William the Conqueror, 231, 

244-49, 262 ; Rufus, 281 ; 

of Malmeslmry, 245-6; of 

Orange, 469-70, 476-9. 



INDEX. 



719 



William III of England, 581, 
586-8, 597, 609-11, 635, 643. 
Williams. Roger, 554, 653-4. 
Winebrennarians, 680. 
Wishart, George, 497. 
Witchcraft, 652, 657. 
Witherspoon, John, 661, 690. 
Wittenberg, 382. 
Wolf, J. C, 599. 



Wolsey, Cardinal, 509-12. 
Women, influence of Christian, 

90, 119, 155, 166, 198, 201-2, 

204-5, 209, 248, 707. 
Worms, Diet of, 393, 397-9. 
Wyclif, John, 32S, 334"44> 35Q. 

Xavier, Francis, 485-7. 
Ximenes, Cardinal, 364. 



Yale College, 656, 670. 
Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciations 710. 
Yule Tide, 241. 

ZlNZENDORF, Count, 46, 6oO, 
625, 669. 

Zurich, reform at, 420-5. 
Zwingli, Ulric, 419-75. 












- ''> V 






* •* 



M °y 

/ * 









^ 






o ** 









^ # 



X 00 . 



o 






,0° 















c 










.0° c c 




•/, 










u 






tf 






















->,~0 * 



V. 



* A ■"*. 









0° - o> N 






,\A 



.,H 






>\ '<>,'*< 



.0 















%/ 

^ 



"* $ 















« 












